All the Little Pieces
by BlackIceWitch
Summary: 1983-2012. How do you get to know someone who doesn't like to talk about their past? See them through the eyes of others. Views of Dean Winchester through those who know him. No slash. No spoilers.
1. Chapter 1 Lawrence 1983

_**Lawrence, Kansas, May-November 1983**_

* * *

Mary Winchester leaned back against the highly stacked pillows, looking down at the baby in her arms. Nine pounds four ounces and the doctors had been joking with her about him being the next linebacker for the Wildcats. She'd smiled politely and told them to get their asses into gear and finish her stitches.

She looked up as the door to the room opened, John peering around the edge, and under him, Dean's wide eyes staring at her.

"Do you want to meet your little brother, Dean?" She smiled at him as he nodded and ran into the room, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum floor, barely stopping himself from crashing into the side of the bed. John followed at a slightly more sedate pace and lifted his son onto the edge of the bed beside his mother.

"He looks scrunchy." Dean looked down at the baby. "And red."

Behind him, John snorted, turning it into a coughing fit as he caught Mary's eye. "He'll smooth out in a day or two, Dean, he just had a tight squeeze to get out."

"You looked like that when you were born too," Mary added, thinking that her firstborn hadn't been anywhere as exhausting, and at the more average birth weight of eight pounds five ounces, a lot easier to get out.

She watched him as he tentatively extended a finger to touch his brother's hand.

"He's going to get bigger, isn't he?" He looked up at her, and she nodded.

"Yes, he's going to get a lot bigger." She glanced at John, peering over her shoulder at his newest son. "It'll be a while before you can play together though."

"That's okay. He doesn't seem to be much fun." He wriggled backwards toward the edge of the bed. "Can I go and play in the toys room?"

John and Mary exchanged a glance. "Yeah, but stay in there, Dean, until I come and get you. No wandering off."

"Yep, sure." He rolled onto his stomach, dropping feet first off the edge of the bed and onto the floor and raced back out the door.

"Well, that wasn't much of a bonding session." John walked to the door and closed it.

Mary rolled her eyes. "He's four. It'll happen, in time."

* * *

"Dean, can you wipe Sam's face, please?" Mary glanced at the table, lifting the pot off the stove as she shut the oven door with her hip.

"Mom … it's icky. And gross. And he dribbles." Dean looked at his brother, his nose wrinkling up as he watched two peas re-emerge from Sam's mouth and fall onto the tray.

"I thought you were going to be my helper today?" She set the pot onto the drainer and looked around distractedly.

Dean's brows drew together. He looked at the mess over his baby brother's face and the tray under it and exhaled gustily. "Oh, all right."

"Thanks, baby." She pointed to the counter. "Clean cloth is there."

He slid off his chair and picked up the white and yellow striped cloth, kicking the step over to the sink, climbing up and turning on the tap.

Mary turned the heat down on the vegetables which were about to boil over and looked into the oven again. The chicken was almost done, just a few more minutes. She shut the door and turned around, watching Dean wipe Sam's face carefully, the baby staring at him in fascination. It wasn't often Dean got this close to him, and he reached out a chubby hand to touch his brother's hair, long and feathery and overdue for a cut.

"Oh! Yuck! Mom!" Dean leapt back, staring in horror at the pureed carrot that had been transferred from Sam's fingers to his hair.

Mary laughed. "It's just carrot, Dean. It won't kill you. Finish up and I'll do the tray."

Bottom lip stuck out mulishly, Dean approached Sam again, leaning back away from him as he wiped the baby's chin and swiped at his hands. Sam gave a throaty laugh and waved his hands at Dean.

Mary watched in amazement as Dean laughed a little too, the carrot in his hair forgotten as his brother looked into his face. Her eldest son's eyes were as wide as Sam's, and she could have sworn there was some kind of communication between them, silent and for siblings only.

"You have to be clean, Sam, before you touch people. You gonna make people sick if you got mashed food all over you."

She could hardly hear his voice, the seriously given advice for Sam's ears only. Sam stared at him and smiled. Dean continued to murmur brotherly wisdom as he cleaned him, and didn't say anything at all when Sam's fingers reached out and wiped down his cheek.

* * *

"Can I read a story to Sam, Mom?" Dean sat on the couch, clean and in his fighter plane pyjamas. Mary glanced at the clock. Another ten minutes to bedtime.

"Sure sweetie, do you want me to get him for you?" She looked at the wide playmat on the floor, Sam sitting up and batting blocks around the middle of it.

"No, I got him." Dean wriggled off the wide couch and crouched beside his brother, putting his arms around him. At six months, Sam was still a big baby, and Dean held him tightly, the baby more than half his height. Mary bit her lip as she watched him carefully roll Sam onto the couch, scrambling up beside him and settling them both back against the overstuffed cushions. Dean was more than careful, she thought, he was absolutely focussed on Sam's safety.

"All okay, Dean?"

He looked up at her as he picked up the big picture book, and nodded. "Sure, Mom."

She watched Sam grab at the pages, Dean carefully lifting his fingers off them as he turned them and read slowly. Where had he learned this patience, this care? He took the same care even when he played, she knew, doing everything methodically, organising things so that he always knew where everything was. Nature, not nurture, she thought. Not from her side of the family either. Watching him, she felt a wild emotion in her chest, not sorrow or joy, not fear or guilt or gratitude, but a strange blend of all of them, tightening her throat. They were so beautiful, her boys, so perfect. Maybe that was a mother's bias, maybe every mother felt it, but it resonated through her, bringing tears to her eyes.

Hearing John come in a few minutes later, she looked up and held a finger to her lips as he turned into the living room. He stopped, and listened, walking quietly up to the back of the couch to look at them.

Sam watched his brother's face as much as the pictures on the paper in front of him. Dean pointing to the words as he read each one, his fingertip moving slowly across the page, his sweet child's voice clear and full of expression as he tried to convey the plight of the three little pigs and the intentions of the Big Bad Wolf to his baby brother.

John looked at Mary, sitting curled up in the armchair, her hand over her mouth as she watched them. He could see the shimmer in her eyes, reflected from the lamp beside her, and felt his chest tighten a little at her emotion. She looked up at him, fingers falling away to reveal a smile that wobbled slightly at the corners.

_Our sons_, her eyes said. _Our boys._


	2. Chapter 2 Blue Earth 1989

_**Blue Earth, Minnesota, July 1989**_

* * *

Jim Murphy opened the door and ushered the boys inside. At ten, Dean knew the drill, carrying their bags upstairs to the room that was theirs when they stayed, Sam trailing behind him.

Jim watched the Impala drive off, the taillights disappearing in the trees that sheltered the drive, and closed the door slowly behind him. He walked down the hall and stopped, seeing Dean and Sam sitting on the stairs in front of him.

"Uncle Jim, is Geny going to be alright?" Dean asked softly, glancing at his brother. "Dad said Valentina was … died."

Jim nodded, drawing in a deep breath. "Your father will make sure that Geny is fine, Dean. It's very hard to lose someone suddenly, it takes a little time to adjust."

He looked at Sam's too-big eyes and tried to think of something that would distract them, for a few hours at least.

"How about a hot chocolate and some late-night TV for a while?" He gestured toward the kitchen and Dean got up, taking Sam's hand and gently tugging him down the stairs and along the hall.

They carried their mugs into the small living room, and Jim found the remote, flicking through the channels. He was regretting the suggestion as he found horror movie after horror movie, foreign dramas and film noir filling the airwaves. He saw an orange-red car spinning out on a dirt road, and stopped there as the theme song for the show played with a lazy country beat.

Glancing at Dean's face, he realised that the rerun was just what was needed, and he hoped that John didn't have any particular feelings about the good ol' boys of Hazzard county one way or the other.

In the warm room, and despite the numerous explosions and crashes on the screen, he watched Sam fall asleep on his brother's leg within the first fifteen minutes. Dean looked down, mouth opening to tell Sam that he was missing all the good stuff, then closing again with the words unsaid. Jim watched him settle back into the cushions and pull the crocheted throw from the back of the sofa down over his brother, his eyes remaining glued to the TV.

When the episode had finished, he turned around to Jim, grinning and said quietly, "Thanks, Uncle Jim. That was awesome." He glanced at Sam. "Too bad he missed it, but he really needed to sleep."

Jim's mouth lifted slightly at one corner. "Yeah. And you too." He got up from his chair and moved next to the couch. "I'll carry Sam up."

"No, it's okay. I got him." He eased his thigh from under his brother's head, lifting back the throw and sliding his arms under the boy's shoulders and knees.

"Night, Uncle Jim."

Jim nodded, watching him carry Sam out of the room and up the stairs.

* * *

"Dean." Jim said quietly to the boy sitting next to him. "Is Sam alright?"

Dean looked up from the gun barrel he was cleaning, glancing through the open doorway to the armchair where Sam was curled up, watching cartoons on the television.

"Yeah, he doesn't talk much when he's upset. He misses Valentina." He looked up at the man next to him. "She was like a mom to Sam, whenever we stayed there."

Jim nodded, wondering at the omission in the sentence. He watched Dean run the cleaner down the barrel and hold it up to the light, squinting slightly as he looked for any leftover residue.

"Are you okay, Dean?"

The boy stopped what he was doing for a second, frozen in place, then slowly lowered the barrel back to the table and put the cleaner down, his gaze on the disassembled parts in front of him.

"I miss her too, Uncle Jim." He fiddled with the cloth on the table. "She wasn't like Mom, but she was nice and she looked after us." He looked back at the armchair. "Sam never knew Mom, not really. So Valentina was like the only Mom he had."

"He's worried that if something like that can happen to Valentina, maybe it can happen to Dad." Dean lifted his face and his eyes met Jim's, bright green in morning light, shimmering behind a veil of held-back tears.

"You're worried about that too?" Jim leaned forward, resting his hand on Dean's shoulder.

A tear slipped free, over the lower lid and Dean turned away, ducking his head and wiping at his eyes.

"No. Dad's not like other hunters, he can survive anything," he said, sniffing slightly, his face still averted.

Jim leaned back in the chair and rubbed his fingertips over his forehead, wondering what to say to that.

"Your Dad's a good hunter, Dean," he finally offered, knowing it was a meaningless thing to say, especially to this boy, who had seen too much for a child his age, and who knew too much even for someone of twice his years. There was nothing else he could say, though, he couldn't offer a guarantee that John would always get out alive and in one piece.

"Yeah." He started putting the gun back together, dribbling a little oil into the mechanism, wiping it all off. "Jim, do you know what happened to my mother?"

Jim felt his heart stop. He looked down, wishing that the question hadn't been asked, wishing that he knew what to answer.

"I know a little, Dean. But you need to talk to your Dad about it."

Dean nodded, too fast. "Dad won't talk about it. I remember … when I was little, he used to tell me about her, we used to talk about her a bit. Now he just gets angry."

Jim knew why that was. He couldn't tell the boy next to him, though. "Dean, your Dad, he misses your mother a lot. Sometimes, when people feel that way, they just can't talk about the person, it hurts too much."

He saw Dean swallow a couple of times and waited patiently. It took the boy time to get things out.

"I don't know if I should tell Sam what I remember about Mom, so that he, you know, he has some kind of memories of her."

Jim closed his eyes. "I think you should, Dean. Sam needs to know about her. All that you can remember."

"I thought so too." Dean looked up at him. "I just don't want Dad to get mad."

"I don't think he will," Jim said. _Not after I've talked to him about it_.

* * *

The night was hot and breathless, and they sat around the small table on the porch, drinking cold lemonade and playing cards, watching the heat lightning on the horizon and hearing the occasional mutter of distant thunder. By ten, Jim had given up on the idea of getting the boys to bed before the storm broke. Inside the house, it was like an oven and tossing and turning on hot sheets wouldn't do anyone any good.

Sam laid a card on the top of the pile, his hand hovering a few inches from it as he waited for his brother's next card to come down. Jim watched the concentration with amusement, the end of the little boy's tongue was sticking out slightly, and Dean's eyes were narrowed, his hand moving more and more slowly toward the pile with the card.

It wasn't a match, and they both relaxed, picking up their drinks and looking at each other.

"When will Dad be back?"

Both Dean and Jim looked at Sam. It had been over a week since they'd arrived and it was the first time he'd spoken.

"Uh, in a couple of days, Sam." Jim looked back down at his cards, trying to hide his surprise and relief, trying not to make too much of the moment.

"Are you playing, Uncle Jim, or are you going to look at those cards a bit longer?" Dean looked at him, an eyebrow lifted, an entreaty in his eyes.

"Son, you have a lot to learn about the art of cards," Jim told him loftily, and laid his card on the top of the pile. It was the same as the card Dean had just put down and he registered it as he pulled his hand back, seeing Dean's eyes widen from the corner of his eye.

"SNAP!" Dean's hand flashed out and claimed the pile. He winked at Sam and looked at Jim, mouth curved into a knowing smirk. "Your reflexes are crap, Uncle Jim."

Jim laughed, shrugging. "They're there when it counts, Dean."

The rumble of thunder was closer now, and the very first stirrings of a slight breeze ruffled their hair. Jim looked at his watch and set his cards down.

"Looks like we'll be getting that storm after all." He stood up and drained his glass. "Time for bed, you two."

Dean looked at his pile in dismay. "But I –"

"Yeah, and you don't think I'm just going to let you keep winning, do you?" Jim shook his head, smiling at the answering scowl.

"Dean's a sore loser, Uncle Jim." Sam looked up at him, putting his cards on top of Jim's as he got up. "He can be really mean."

Dean's mouth dropped open. "I am not a sore loser, twerp. You're a sore loser."

"Are too."

"Am not."

"Are too."

"Am –"

"This isn't really getting us anywhere." Jim interjected. "Sam, go brush your teeth, Dean, help me get this packed away."

Sam turned away and ran into the house, and Jim could hear his feet pounding up the stairs. He looked at Dean.

"Good to hear him back to normal."

"Yeah." Dean smiled slightly, straightening out his pile of cards and gathering up the others.

* * *

The cry in the darkness came just after the crack of the lightning strike and the ground-shaking roll of thunder, and Jim snapped awake, sitting up as the sheet fell off him. _The boys_.

He slid from the bed and walked quietly down the hall, pushing their door open slightly. He could hear Dean's voice, murmuring softly over Sammy's sobs. Through the gap, he saw Dean sitting on Sam's bed, his arms wrapped around the little boy, rocking him gently.

"S'okay, Sammy, it was just a bad dream. Because of the storm. Ssshhh."

Sam's weeping subsided into hiccups, then silence as he listened to his brother.

"We all get bad dreams, they're not real. There aren't any real monsters, Sam, you know that. Just too much TV." Dean smoothed down Sam's hair, patted his back.

"But it looked real, Dean. Not like the cartoons, not like pictures, it had bright eyes and it looked at me." Sam wiped his nose on his sleeve, looking up at Dean's face. "And Dad was there."

Dean rested his cheek against the top of Sam's head, brows drawn together. "In bad dreams, everything looks real, Sam. Doesn't make it real. And if Dad was there, he woulda killed it, long before it got anywhere near you." He lifted his head and looked down at Sam, wiping the tears from his cheeks. "You know Dad protects us from anything bad."

Sam nodded, a little reluctantly, Jim thought, watching silently.

"You protect me more."

Dean shook his head, shifting around slightly. "I just clean up your messes, Sam, make sure you get to bed on time." He smiled at him. "Dad keeps us safe."

Jim drew back from the door, leaning against the hallway wall. Sam had it right, he thought wearily. Dean was his protector, his all-the-time protector, not John.


	3. Chapter 3 Sioux Falls 1992

_**Sioux Falls, South Dakota. November, 1992**_

* * *

Bobby turned off the engine and the tick of the slowly cooling metal was the only sound they could hear.

The early morning mist shrouded the woods and fields, rising from the river and the marshes, from the thin scrim of ice that whitened the ground, hiding the details of the land and swallowing sound, muffling even the heavy clunks of the truck doors closing.

"You ready?" Bobby looked over the boys beside him. Dean, getting tall and lanky now, the bolt-action 308 Winchester 70 rifle slung over one shoulder, and Sammy, still small and skinny, holding his .22 with the barrel pointed to the ground, the ammo bag strap across his shoulder and chest, both of them nodding seriously at him.

"You remember what I taught you last time? Hunting in the woods?" Bobby started to walk for the forest, glancing back over his shoulder at them.

"Yessir." Dean followed him, walking in the old man's footprints, his hand anchoring the butt of the rifle against his hip.

"Yes, Uncle Bobby." Sam hurried to catch up to his brother, as they disappeared into the mist.

"Alright." Bobby walked on, confidently across the rough ground that he knew well enough to walk blindfolded. Around them, the skeletal branches of the bare trees were black against the soft grey of the ground fog, and the trunks wavered in and out of view as they got closer and left them behind. He stopped a few yards onto the narrow trail and turned around.

"What can you hear?"

Dean listened. He could hear the steady drip of moisture falling from the branches of the trees and the leaves of the evergreen shrubs falling onto the thick carpet of dead leaves under their feet. He could a rustle, somewhere to their right, deeper in the forest.

Sam shook his head. "I can't hear anything."

"You remember what that means?" Bobby looked at them, feeling the moisture in the air soaking into his jacket. He was getting too old for these early morning hunts, he thought absently, his joints were stiffening slightly from the damp chill.

"Means that the animals know we're in the forest. Or something else is here, something big." Dean looked up at him.

Bobby nodded. "So don't be clomping your great feet hard onto the ground, step soft, watch out for the ground cover, try and be as quiet as you can. Deer have pretty good hearing." He turned away, moving down the trail silently, avoiding the dry leaves close to the edge of the trail.

Behind him, the boys followed, paying attention to the noises they were making, turning to avoid the occasional branch that protruded out onto the trail, picking up and putting down their feet as silently as they could.

* * *

A mile along the trail, Bobby stopped, holding his hand up. Ahead, through the trees, he could see the outline of the young buck, the rack almost indistinguishable from the bare branches in the pearlescent light and shadows of the mist. He glanced back at Dean, gesturing sharply to the deer. Dean looked past him and nodded, picking out the shape quickly.

The air was still and heavy, and Bobby moved slowly along the trail, hearing nothing behind him, glad that they'd remembered some of what they'd been taught. Twice they stopped and froze as the buck raised its head, looking around, moving on when it returned to stripping the bark from the shrub at its feet.

They crouched between the trees, and Bobby leaned close to Dean, his voice just a breath against the boy's ear.

"Behind the shoulder, take your time."

Dean nodded and lifted the rifle, closing an eye as he sighted along the barrel, his finger slipping onto the trigger. Bobby watched him, noting the small, careful movements with approval, the final adjustments, the smooth pull on the trigger. The rifle shot cracked into the silence and he watched the deer bound out of the clearing and down to the river, crossing the shallow water in two leaps and disappearing into the forest beyond it.

"What happened?" He frowned down the rifle. The boy should have nailed that buck easily.

"I don't know." Dean looked up at him, shaking his head slightly. "Must have shifted the barrel slightly when I pulled on the trigger."

Bobby stared at him for a moment. He hadn't seen the barrel move at all. He sighed and shrugged, getting to his feet. "Well, never mind. We'll find another one."

An hour later, Bobby was scowling down at them. They'd found four deer in that time, in perfect situations. Both boys had managed to miss all four times.

"Waste of my time and ammunition if you two are going to miss all the time." He growled at Dean.

Dean's brows lifted. "It wasn't on purpose, Bobby, I just must've moved at the last second."

"In a pig's eyes, it wasn't on purpose, Dean Winchester. Don't you lie to me, boy. Takes as much skill to miss a shot like that as it does to make it." He turned around, heading back down the trail, muttering to himself.

Dean looked at Sam, the corner of his mouth lifting up. Sam grinned back at him, and they followed Bobby out of the woods and back to the truck.

* * *

The firelight flickered over the faces of the man and the boy who sat beside it, the circle of light reaching out to illuminate the tree trunks and rocks, the small tent and the half-covered bedroll of the camp. Sam was already asleep in the tent.

"Alright, you wanna tell me what you two were playing at today?" Bobby hooked the coffee pot from the embers and poured the thick black coffee into his mug, setting the pot back as he looked at Dean.

Dean shrugged, keeping his gaze on the fire. "We didn't need it."

"You think that when the time comes you do need it, you're gonna be able to do it without practising?" Bobby said sourly.

"You said it yourself, Bobby. Took as much skill to miss as to hit it. If I had to, I could do it." Dean glanced at him.

"Cocky little shit, ain't you?"

Dean's mouth twisted into a small half-smile. "You think I'd freeze up and miss, if I was hungry?"

Bobby grunted non-committally and drank his coffee.

"Sam's been having nightmares." Dean's gaze was back on the fire. "I didn't want to make that worse."

"Nightmares about what?" Bobby shifted slightly, looking over his shoulder at the tent.

"You know what." He exhaled loudly. "Dad, hunting, monsters, ghosts."

Bobby was silent. Neither of the boys had gotten much of a childhood. Dean had kept the truth from his brother as long as he could, but living the way they did it had been an impossible hope to think that he could do it forever. Or even for a few years more.

"I wanted him to stay a kid, just for a bit longer." He looked over at Bobby. "He shouldn't have to worry about this crap yet."

Neither of them should have had to worry about this crap, Bobby thought tiredly. They should have been thinking about school and friends, and girls and ball games. Building treehouses and go-karts, riding bikes and coming home at sundown tired out from the fun in their days.

John had taught Dean to shoot at six, Sam at seven. Both boys knew how to take care of their weapons, were completely disciplined about following orders, about looking after themselves, could put on a competent field-dressing and set up an overnight camp in ten minutes. Their childhoods had disappeared years ago.

Dean talked as if he were tough, but Bobby had soothed his nightmares whenever they'd stayed with him. The boy's imagination was a lot more powerful than his little brother's or his father's, Bobby thought, so much so that he would make a good hunter, a great one, even. Get inside of the heads of the monsters he tracked and give himself a bucketload of nightmares when the hunts were over and the victims were counted.

Dean looked around at the old man's continuing silence. "You think I'm wrong?"

"No, son, I don't think you're wrong," Bobby said quietly. "The load's the load, Dean. Whether we can carry it or not, we get what we get. I jus' don't see how you can make that easier on Sam."

Dean ducked his head, drawing his legs up and wrapping his arms around them, tucking his chin into them. "I was thinking, that maybe … if Dad agreed … Sam could stay with you a bit more."

Bobby's mouth quirked at one corner. "That'd be fine with me, Dean. Fine if you stayed too."

The boy shook his head decisively. "No, Dad needs backup, I need to be with him. But Sam, he's really smart, he's good at school stuff and he likes it. He could have a bit more of a normal life, for a couple more years."

Bobby turned to look at him. "You deserve a childhood too, you know, Dean."

He watched the characteristic duck of the head. "I'm alright."

He wasn't alright, Bobby knew. He was nearly doubled over under the load of responsibility that had been placed on him, that he'd placed on himself, his self-confidence being eroded by the demands of keeping his father and little brother safe and not being sure he could. Maybe it would be better if Sam, at least, was removed from his load, protected by an adult so that he didn't have to worry so much about him.

"I'll talk to your Daddy when he gets back, Dean." Bobby finished his coffee. "Not sure it'll do much good, you understand, but I'll talk to him."

Dean nodded.

* * *

"You know, Dean, this is really pretty good writing." Sam looked up from the paper he was reading to his brother, sitting across the kitchen table from him. At the sink, Bobby stilled, the dishcloth still on the plate, his hands in the soapy warm water as he listened.

Dean looked across the table, brows drawing together. "Where'd you get that?"

"It was here." Sam gestured at the pile of school books sitting to one side of him.

"That's my homework, put it back." Dean looked at the paper, then back to his brother. "Now."

Sam shrugged, replacing the paper on the pile. "I was just saying it was a good piece."

"Right." Dean dropped his gaze to his knife again, the small circles over the stone a little faster now.

"Why do you pretend that you hate school, when you could do well if you wanted to?" Sam leaned on the table, watching him.

"I'm not pretending to hate school. It's a waste of my time."

"Dad says you gotta go. If you have to go anyway, wouldn't it be better to at least try to like it?"

"No." Dean looked up again, lips compressed. "And let's just drop this conversation there."

"Sure." Sam gathered his books and carried them out. Bobby heard Dean's deep exhale and starting washing the plate again, looking down at the sudsy water absently. He'd noticed this before, a tendency to downplay any achievement that might be conceivably regarded as academic. Or thoughtful. Bobby'd never figured out why that was. An old, odd memory rose into his mind, from his school days. Two girls had moved into town, in his freshman year. Two years apart. What had their names been? Cleggmore. Uh, Charlene had been the older one. The smart one. And Alice, had been the younger one. The pretty one. He remembered them going through high school. The smart one and the pretty one. He'd dated Alice a few times, before he met Karen. She hadn't just been pretty, she'd gotten good grades, could have done even better if it hadn't been so accepted that she wasn't the smart one. She'd never believed him though.

He glanced over his shoulder at Dean, hearing the soft burr of the knife blade circling on the stone. Was that was going on with Dean? He didn't think he was good enough to compete with Sam? Or was he staying out of the way so that they never had to?

"You doing alright with your school work, Dean?" He picked up another plate and put it into the water.

"Yeah, no problem." Dean hunched a little a deeper into the chair.

"Sam's right, you know. If you gotta be there, you might as well pick up whatever you can. Never know when stuff like that comes in useful down the road." He put the dish in the drainer and picked up the next.

Dean chewed on the corner of his lip. "It's boring, Bobby. None of it has anything to do with real life."

Bobby smiled, glancing back at him. "For most people, all of it has to do with real life."

"We're not most people." Dean looked along the edge of the blade and set the stone onto the table. "And I'm never going to be like most people."

"You might want to get out of hunting, one day," Bobby said mildly.

"I won't." He stood up, turning around and looking at the man's back. "What we do is important. It saves lives. You think that working in some job somewhere is going to feel like that?"

"You think there's any rule that says you can't be a good hunter and have a few aces up your sleeve if you do want to change your mind one day?"

"I think I need to concentrate on what I want to do." Dean looked down at the essay he'd written for his English class. "No one thinks I can do this crap anyway." He screwed up the sheet and threw it on the floor, turning on his heel and walking out of the room.

Bobby watched him go, his eyes worried. He dried his hands and bent to pick up the discarded paper, smoothing it out and moving under the overhead light to read it. When he reached the end, he sighed. Sam was right. It was good. It was expressive and passionate and written with a feeling for the subject that seemed a lot older than the average thirteen year old. And why not, he thought suddenly, Dean was a lot older than the average thirteen year old in a lot of ways.

He sat down at the table and picked up the English notebook, flicking through it. The marks leapt out at him in red ink. At the first one, he read the work, his frown becoming deeper as he finished it, looking at the D that sat at the top of the page. He turned the page over and started the next one. He read right through the assignments of the last four weeks.

Dean's teacher was an asshole, he thought. There was no reason for those marks for that work and some of the comments scrawled over the pages were downright personal. He slid the essay inside the book and closed it, setting it back on the pile, and walked around the table and out in to the hall. The boys shared a room upstairs, but Dean had taken to going into the yard at night if he wanted to be alone. Bobby went out the back door and rounded the house, seeing the boy's outline silhouetted against the outside light of the workshop.

"Dean." He came up beside him, leaned against the panel of the Nova he was working on. "What's going on at school?"

Dean looked at him and shook his head. "I don't know. Guy hates me. Doesn't matter what I put in, or how much time I work on something, I never get better than a C, and …" He shook his head again.

"You do anything that might have gotten him POed at you when you started?" He had to ask, Dean had a bad habit of smart-mouthing off if a comment came at the right moment, thinking nothing of it at the time.

"No. I didn't say a word to anyone." He shrugged. "It doesn't matter, Dad'll be back in a couple of days and we'll be somewhere else."

Bobby closed his eyes. He was right. They would be gone. There would be a new town. A new school. He could see why the kid couldn't see the point of trying to learn. Between asshole teachers and the constant moving, he'd never seen any rewards for work put in at school.

"I don't want a normal life, Bobby." Dean's voice broke in the middle of the words, cracking high and then dropping low. He cleared his throat. "Nothing about me fits in anymore. Half the time I don't know what they're talking about, I'm always trying to catch up. I'm kind of sick of it."

"I can't argue with that, son. But look at this way, no one benefits your learning 'cept you. Makes no difference to the teachers, or the school, or your Dad, or me. Only you. So whatever you can learn and take away with you, that's yours forever. They can't take that. You own it."

Beside him, he heard the soft sigh. "I guess."

"You don't have to impress anyone but yourself. But giving up, not trying, that's just shooting yourself in the foot, Dean. You're the only one who's going to lose out."


	4. Chapter 4 Covington 2000

_**Covington, Indiana, July 2000.**_

* * *

The diner was small, crowded and redolent with the smells of bacon, sausage, eggs, pancakes, burgers and coffee. Sam pushed his food around his plate, his appetite gone.

Dean had been fine for about a day after he and Dad had finally reached Blue Earth from Flagstaff. He'd been a bit subdued, but mostly fine. Then slowly, gradually, he'd started to withdraw. Now, his brother wasn't talking at all, at least not to him. He seemed to be wary around Dad as well, but at least he would talk and listen to him.

Looking at him furtively from under the hair that flopped over his forehead, Sam could see that Dean's appetite wasn't any better than his own. There was still a sausage and a pile of bacon to one side of the plate.

He knew that his brother wasn't sleeping much. He'd been woken the last few nights by the nightmares, Dean's voice muttering in the darkness, the sounds of the covers being thrown back or falling to the floor. It didn't take a genius to figure out what he was dreaming about, to know what was bothering him. But he wouldn't talk about it.

Knowing what the problem was didn't help. Even knowing, pretty much, what Dean was feeling about it didn't really help. There was nothing either of them could do to change what had happened. He'd needed to get out and he'd gone, and he hadn't thought of how Dean would react, hadn't thought of his brother's overwhelming sense of responsibility for him, hadn't thought about his father's orders or even considered how he would deal with Dean when he found out.

And that wasn't the worst bit, he thought now, glancing up at the pale, drawn face on the other table again. The worst bit was that Dean knew why he'd gone, he'd understood why he hadn't thought of them, but it had broken something, deep inside of his brother, to realise that he didn't mean the same to Sam, as Sam meant to him.

He ran his hand through his hair, pushing it back off his face and looked up.

"How long did Dad say he'd been on the side-trip?"

Dean kept his eyes on his plate. "He didn't."

"So, where are we meeting him again?" Sam tried again.

"Cut it out. You were there, you heard him." Dean stood abruptly and pulled his wallet out, tossing a couple of tens onto the table and grabbing his jacket. He was halfway out the diner when Sam caught up with him. The two of them were on their own. Their father was checking out another lead, but would meet them in Alabama in a couple of days' time. Sam strode out of the diner and down the street toward the Impala, watching his brother unlock it and get in, his face dark and closed.

Two days of silence between them, the rock music filling the car, right at the edge of bearable decibels. Two days of silence, sitting in motel rooms, the TV, if there was one, and if it was working, blaring away with no one really watching it. Two days of silence when they ate, Dean unable to look at him half the time, his face as shuttered as it was now, his eyes darkened with a pain that he couldn't or wouldn't let go.

Sam slid into the passenger seat and leaned back against the cool glass of the window. His whole life, from his earliest memories, his brother had looked after him, taken care of him, made sure he was fed, clean, dressed, rested, taught him to do … pretty much everything. Dean had stood between him and the creatures that had occasionally managed to find them when their father hadn't been around. He'd stood between him and their father when the rage had been spilling over and looking for something to bite. He'd been a constant, not always nice, not always friendly, but always there, and always, always at his back, someone to talk to, someone to listen, someone, sometimes, to cry with.

Even after all that time, Sam still didn't really understand his brother. He knew the facts, he knew the habits and the tells and the expressions and the strengths and the weaknesses. But he didn't understand him. He didn't understand the unyielding loyalty to family. To Dad. He didn't understand the places in his brother where he had no armour at all, where he could be hurt so deeply that it would feel like a mortal wound. He'd seen Dean hurt, usually by Dad, rarely by the opposite sex, but he'd never really considered that anything could get through the armour that his brother wore around him out of habit. And he hadn't known that that armour didn't exist for him.

He'd apologised and apologised and apologised, half a dozen times a day for weeks. It didn't help. After awhile Dean had told him to stop, had told him that he knew Sam hadn't meant it to turn out the way it had. And, in a drunken and overtired moment over a week ago, had told him that thing he'd always counted on, that Sam would do anything for him, as he would for his brother, had vanished the day he'd disappeared.

He still didn't understand it, really. Nothing had changed. He was the same person he'd always been. He didn't know how his taking off could have caused that break in Dean. There'd been times when his brother had walked out, driven out by frustration or pain or anger when the tension between the three of them had gotten too much. It was usually just an overnight thing, and he'd be back in the morning, maybe nursing a black eye or moving a bit stiffly with bruised ribs for a day or two, whatever frustration or anger he'd been feeling vented with a double dose of alcohol and a fight. He'd never actually packed up and left them, Sam had to admit.

He turned around, looking at his brother, mouth opening to say something, and Dean, seeing the half-formed movement in the corner of his eye, reached over to the stereo, his finger and thumb finding the volume control unerringly, twisting it hard to the right. Zeppelin filled the car, drowning out whatever Sam might have been about to say, pounding at their eardrums, making the windows hum in resonance with the driving beat.

Sam looked at his brother's profile, outlined against the farmland they drove through, for a long moment, then turned away, resting his temple against the window, and staring out at the scenery.

* * *

It took Dean a little over ten hours to make the drive down to Alabama. They stopped twice for fuel and coffee and food. Sam realised the futility of trying to talk when the volume went back up to full after both stops, as soon as they hit the highway. He slept most of the way after the second time.

* * *

"Dad's case notes." Dean tossed the file at him and turned away, sitting down on the couch with another pile of files, notes and photocopies and photographs. He took the lid off his beer, drank a mouthful and set it down beside the papers on the low table, and started to read.

Sam looked at the beer and sighed. He got up and got one for himself, then opened the file and began to look through it, pretending that the heavy silence in the room was how they always worked.

After three hours, he had four pages of notes, a page of questions that needed to be followed up, a tension headache and his feelings had slowly mutated from wanting to make things right to a rising indignation that he was being punished for being who he was.

"You know, this isn't fair." He looked at Dean. His brother lifted his gaze from the pages he was reading and slowly turned to look at him. He should have recognised the warning in the half-lidded eyes, the ever-so-slight lift of one brow.

"I didn't change, Dean. I'm still who I was." Sam ignored Dean's silence. "You and Dad, you knew how important graduation was to me, you just didn't care."

Dean picked up the beer and tipped it up, swallowing the last mouthful, nodding. "So it's our fault that you broke all our protocols, packed your bag and ran off like a little kid, Sam?"

He had the grace to look away, a line of red rising up his neck at the rebuke. "You've known for a long time that I don't want this life, Dean."

"Yeah. I know that." Dean looked back at the notes in front of him. "I didn't think you'd ditch us. Didn't think you'd be such an asshole that you'd just take off, no note, no explanation, just gone." He looked back at his brother, eyes narrowed and jaw tense. "Didn't think you'd leave me holding the bag, when you knew how freaked Dad has been about sticking together."

Sam stared back at him, chin raised defiantly. "If I told you that I wanted out you would have locked the friggin' door and not let me out of the house."

Dean nodded. "Yeah, I would have."

"So what choice did you leave me?"

His brother laughed, a short, humourless bark. "You just don't get it, do you?"

The accusation stung. He did get it. He'd gotten it years ago. His father wanted revenge for the death of his wife. His brother idolised the man and was happy to become a younger version, without any thought of what that meant. He got it.

"I want a normal life, Dean. I want to be with normal people."

His brother's head snapped around at that, eyes dark and narrowed. "What's that supposed to mean, Sam?"

"It means that I'm not like you and Dad, and I don't want to be." Sam knew where to aim, for maximum damage. He saw an emotion cross Dean's face, too fast to decipher.

Dean stood up and walked to the door, grabbing his jacket from the hook and yanking it on.

"Where are you going?" Sam looked at him, seeing the stiffness in his movements.

"Out." Dean opened the door, walked out and slammed it shut. Sam looked at the keys still sitting on the cupboard next to the door.

* * *

At one o'clock he started to get worried. By two thirty he was pacing up and down the room, wondering if he should go looking for Dean. The fact that he'd left the car behind meant he'd gone to get drunk, Sam thought, but the bars around here would have closed long ago. His brother was predictable in many ways. He didn't stay the night when he went looking for a girl. He was always back, well before dawn. If not a girl, then what?

At three, he grabbed the keys and his jacket and went out, locking the door behind him and going to the Impala. He started the engine and backed out carefully, turning onto the street, cruising slowly. Start with the nearest bar, and work his way out from there, he thought, chewing on his lip.

He turned into the alley, the headlights lighting up the tableau near the other end, the men frozen in its beams. The engine's deep notes echoed from the brick walls as he pulled up, and Sam saw Dean lift his head, recognising it.

He popped the glove box and pulled out the Taurus, then turned off the engine, leaving the headlights on. Three men stood in front of him, one holding the collar of his brother's jacket, one stood behind the others, cradling an arm. The third one stood beside Dean, knuckles grazed and bloody, the short length of pipe in his hand half-raised.

Dean was half-kneeling, one eye swollen shut, the other rolling around to try and see past the bright light. Sam could see the split over his nose, which now sat to one side, blood covering his mouth and chin and shirt front. A split over one cheek was also bleeding freely. The jawline under the other cheek was swelling, mottled as the bruising started to come out.

"Sam?" Dean's voice was hoarse and uneven. "That you?"

"Step away from him." Sam raised the Taurus, levelling the barrel at the man with the pipe.

"You must be the douche bag kid brother." The man smiled at his friend, gesturing at Dean. "Told us all about you, he did."

Sam ignored the comment, flicking the safety off. "I said, step away."

The other man let go of his brother's jacket, and Dean slumped to the ground, leaning back against the dumpster behind him, his open eye vivid in the bright light from the car, standing out against the darkness of the bruises rising around it, the red of the blood that was under it.

"You remind him we don't like smart-mouthed punks here, kid." The man with the pipe walked past him slowly. "Like to get their faces rearranged if they show up again."

The men backed away from him for several yards, then turned and walked to the other end of the alley, disappearing into the darkness. Sam watched them go, waiting until he could no longer hear their footsteps before he put the safety back on and tucked the big gun into his jacket pocket. He walked toward Dean, and crouched in front of him.

"Douche bag, eh?"

Dean's eye rolled toward him. "You are a douche bag."

"Lucky for you I came looking." He gripped Dean's forearm, and pulled back, hauling him to his feet, lifting one arm over his shoulders. Dean hawked back and spat out a mouthful of blood, tilting his head back as he stumbled beside his brother to the car.

Sam leaned him against the rear door as he got the passenger door open and eased his brother inside. He closed the door and went around to the driver's side. He'd have to take him to Emergency, he thought. The nose was broken, and he couldn't reset it himself, not without leaving it crooked. He didn't know what other injuries Dean had.

"Family sticks together, Sam."

"What do you think I'm doing here, Dean?" He looked over at him sourly. He put the car in reverse, backed out of the alley and onto the street and turned for the hospital, glancing at the huddled form beside him, eyes closed now. He looked back at the road, making a right hand turn when he saw the sign for the Emergency room.

"You're all I've got, man."

The words were very soft, and Sam touched the brake, looking over at him, not sure that he heard them right.

"I'm still here, Dean. I'm still your brother."

There was no answer, and Sam drove on, pulling into the slot next to the ER bay and shutting off the car. He reached out and shook Dean's arm, realising that he'd passed out when he got no response.

Maybe that was a good thing, he thought nervously, his mind replaying his brother's words, the misery underlying them. Maybe he'd forget this for a while.


	5. Chapter 5 Decker 2002

_**Decker, Montana, August, 2002**_

* * *

"Heads up, he's coming to." Clay looked across at the young man, bound tightly to the straight-backed wooden carver with rope around his chest, arms and ankles.

"Bout time," Mike said sourly, lifting the shotgun from his knees and cocking it.

Clay looked at the trickle of dried blood at the back of the man's head, then to his cousin. "You hit him pretty hard."

"Not as hard as I'm gunna." He watched the boy's eyes open slowly, focussing as he lifted his head.

"John Winchester's boy, ain't you?" He stood up, holding the shotgun casually in one hand. "The oldest one? Dean?"

Dean's brows drew together as he looked up at the man in front of him. "Who're you?"

Mike moved fast for a big man, the butt of the shotgun slamming against Dean's jaw and snapping his head to one side.

"Better get this straight right now, boy." Mike looked down. "I ask the questions, you answer them. Any lip and it'll all get a lot worse."

The young man spat out the blood in his mouth and looked back up, the pain shoved down behind the anger in his eyes.

Mike's mouth rose in a half-smile, admiring the kid's balls. "Where's your Dad at, kid?"

"Don't know."

"Wrong answer." Mike smacked the butt of the gun down on fingers that rested along the flat wooden arm of the chair and the three of them heard the crack as the bones broke. He watched the kid's face, saw the skin pale, the freckles stand out, heard the grinding of his teeth as he clamped tightly them together, forcing the scream back down his throat.

"You getting this, Clay?" Mike turned to his cousin with a grin. "How long ya think it'll take him to learn to answer proper?"

Clay shook his head. "Depends on how many brains he's got, Mike."

Mike looked back down at Dean, eyes narrowing very slightly. "Where's your Dad at, Dean?"

He watched the younger man's face tighten slightly, wariness now in the green eyes instead of sass.

"He went to check out a lead on a case, in Billings. He'll be back in a couple of days."

"There now. Didn't take long at all." Mike grinned at him.

The kid sat still, his left hand still flat against the arm of the chair, his right clenched into a fist.

"We looked around for your brother, as well." Clay said from the table a few yards away. "Couldn't find him."

Dean's head turned slowly to look at him, his face expressionless.

"Your Dad, see, well he was poking his nose into things that didn't concern him. Killed our cousin, Frank. Can't let that go."

"That's enough of the history lesson, Clay. This boy don't need to know anything about our business."

Clay looked down at the gun he was cleaning. "Just didn't want him to think there was no reason for this, Mike."

"You're hunters?" Dean looked up at Mike.

"Yeah, we're hunters." Mike glanced at Clay. "And we hunt what we want."

He saw the slight line form between Dean's brows. "Don't think too hard, boy. It really ain't none of your concern."

Dean was silent, looking down at his fingers, the broken ones already starting to swell.

"So, where's your brother?"

He looked up quickly at the man next to him, and this time Mike saw the fear in his eyes, the sight bringing a small smile to his face.

"Come on, ain't got all day." He lifted the shotgun slightly and saw the kid swallow.

"College."

Mike whistled and turned to look at Clay. "Hear that, Clay? College." He looked back at Dean. "Well, whoopty-do. How come he got to go to college and you had to stay behind?"

"Not my thing."

Mike laughed. "Yeah, couldn't deal with it meself either." He leaned forward slightly. "And which college did young Sam Winchester go to?"

Dean looked away.

"I said, which college, boy." Mike straightened up slightly, raising the gun again. "Don't make me break something else."

"UCLA." Dean looked down at the floor of the shed, shoulders slumping. "Got a scholarship."

"My, a scholarship. Guess he's the brains of the outfit, then." Mike turned away and walked to the table, picking up the beer he'd left there, sitting down in the chair. "Have to go and pay that boy a visit, after we're done here."

Clay looked at him, his forehead wrinkling slightly. "Mike, we don't have to do that."

"Sure we do, don't want to leave anyone behind who might get the old itch for vengeance."

He turned to look at Dean, feeling the kid's eyes on him. "What are you looking at, boy?"

Dean's gaze didn't waver. "Nothing." His voice was flat. "I might not have gotten Dad's travel plans exactly right."

Mike put the bottle down and leaned forward, hand tightening around the gun at the new tone in the kid's voice.

"That so?" He stood up and walked back to him. "And what did you get wrong?"

"Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure he said he was going to your place." Dean said slowly, looking up at him. "Said your wife called him and told him to get over there 'cause she needed a man to fuck her."

Both of the hunters froze as the words sank in. Clay rolled his eyes.

"Geez, kid you shouldn't a said that." He looked at Mike who was staring at the young man with a frightening intensity.

"Get me the can, Clay, from the back of the truck." Mike's voice was low and husky.

"Clay, come on, he was just trying to get to you," he said nervously, fiddling with the cloth he held.

"Right now, Clay, you do it or I'll blow a hole in you." Mike tore his gaze from the kid and looked at his cousin, the barrel swinging up and around.

Clay nodded, putting his rifle back on the table and dropping the soft cloth on top of it.

"You think you're smart, kid?" Mike turned back to Dean. "You think you gonna make it out of here alive?"

"No." Dean stared up at him, his face cold.

"Damned right you're not. But I'd have put a bullet in your brain, taken you out nice and clean and quick, before you said that. Now, it's gonna be something else altogether."

Clay came back in, holding a five gallon red plastic jerrican. Mike watched as Dean's eyes dropped to it, saw the tremor that shook through him.

"Yeah, something else entirely." He took the can and unscrewed the lid, dropping it onto the floor. The raw reek of gasoline filled the space.

He picked up the can, lifting it over Dean's head and started to pour. The liquid splashed down over his hair, soaking into his clothes. Dean ducked his head, eyes and mouth shut tightly.

"Clay, get his head up." Mike growled at the other man as he continued to empty the can.

Clay picked up his gun, and walked to the front of the chair, jamming the end of the barrel under Dean's chin and thrusting it up. The gasoline splashed over his face, going up his nose, and into his mouth as he tried to clear it.

Mike put down the can and looked at him, seeing that the fuel had saturated his clothing, filled his boots and coated his skin. Dean shook his head, drops of the gas flying off as he tried to get it off his eyes.

"Now, Dean … where's your father really at?" Mike's voice was low and soft, as he reached into a pocket.

Dean opened his eyes, the lids red and swelling and raw, stinging as the gas trickled into the corners.

"Fuck you," he said quietly, staring into Mike's eyes.

Mike lifted the lighter from his pocket, flicking the lid open and holding it in front of Dean's face.

"You wanna rethink that answer?" He shifted his thumb to the wheel. "Maybe, take a second or so to think about what's gonna happen to you if I light this and drop it onto you?"

Dean looked at the lighter, eyes slightly unfocussed as the pain in them increased. He shook his head again suddenly, droplets flying from his hair onto Mike.

"Yeah, sorry." He shifted his gaze up to Mike's face. "Fuck you, bitch."

Mike's face twisted and he raised his hand, the thumb running the wheel and the flame lighting.

* * *

The gunshot thundered in the closed space, the heavy calibre bullet almost taking Mike's hand off at the wrist, sending the lighter backward into a pile of straw at the back of the shed.

He screamed when he saw half of his hand hanging limply from the broken bones of his arm, looked up and saw the man's outline silhouetted against the brightness of the sunshine outside.

"Clay, get him!"

Clay lifted the rifle, and fired, but the man had gone, moving fast into the shed and to the right, and the next shot took Clay in the side, ploughing through ribs and lungs and heart, exiting messily out his back. He dropped slowly as if in disbelief, the rifle thudding onto the dirt.

"Goddamn it!" Mike dove for the table, grabbing his shotgun from the top, twisting violently to avoid landing on his injury. He hit the ground on his shoulder, the impact jarring the entire arm and he screamed again as the limp hand swung around, into the leg of the table. Holding the arm against his chest, he crawled from the table to the side of the shed, leaving a trail of blood.

John Winchester looked out from behind the engine block of the tractor he was using for cover, smelling smoke. The straw the lighter had landed in was aflame now, the fire greedily sucking at the air and dry plant matter, getting bigger by the second. He could smell the gasoline they'd poured over his son and his priorities changed, as he drew the long knife from the sheath at his belt and ran, doubled over, for the chair.

"Dad?" Dean coughed, smelling the smoke in the shed, hearing the crackle of the flames as they worked through the straw, unable to see at all now.

"Yeah." John sliced downward and the ropes around his chest fell free. He rammed the blade between the rope and the chair leg and yanked it back. "There's a big water tank outside, Dean. As soon as you're free, you get out there and get into it, alright?"

"I can't see."

John heard the fear in his son's voice, and felt his anger rise. "You're twenty paces from the door of the shed. The tank is another thirty paces past it, on the left. Shed's on fire."

Dean nodded, feeling the other ankle freed, his good hand lifting and wiping the gas from the skin of his face as the blade cut through the ropes. John pulled him out of the chair and spun him around, shoving him toward the door as he started to fire in direction he'd last seen Mike.

Dean stumbled out of the door, seeing the world change from a big dark blur to a big light blur, he started counting as he registered the change, bearing left.

John looked around the left wall of the shed, at the empty forty four gallon drums lined up there, the rolls of wire netting, reels of barb. He heard a soft crash as Mike shifted incautiously against a length of timber and it fell.

"Come on, John, you ain't gonna kill me in cold blood, are you?" Mike's voice came from the row of drums and John shifted his aim, seeing the top of the man's head moving slightly through the thick smoke that was filling the shed.

"No, I'm not going to kill you in cold blood," John agreed readily, the barrel of the .45 revolver tracking the man steadily.

"I knew it." Mike peered cautiously out from behind the last barrel.

John's finger tightened on the trigger smoothly, and the bullet punched through the empty barrel and into Mike's leg, the man screaming and falling out onto the dirt.

"I'm just gonna make sure you can't out of here, and let you burn to death, you goddamned sonofabitch." John added conversationally as he walked up to him. He put a second bullet through the other leg and looked down at Mike's face.

"I told you not to come after me, Mike. I told you to keep your nose clean and get your act together." He crouched down, reloading the revolver.

"You can't tell us what to do!" Mike snarled, anger breaking through the fear.

"Sure I can." John looked down at him. "You don't grab my son and try to burn him alive. Not and expect to get away with it."

He stood up, and saw Dean standing in the doorway, dripping again, this time with water. The fire had spread to a pile of dry lumber at the back of the shed now, and the flames were roaring with a real voice.

"You're not a hunter, Mike. You're a sociopath. A monster. And I kill monsters."

He turned away, ignoring the screams and shouts of the man lying on the ground behind him, and walked over to his son.

"Come on, better get you cleaned up."

Dean looked past him, into the inferno at the back of the shed, at the blurry outline of the man lying on the dirt to one side. Then he turned and helped his father pull the big sliding door shut.

* * *

John pulled a blanket from behind the seat of the truck and wrapped it around his son.

"Get in. I've got some stuff to get the gas out of your eyes back at the room."

Dean got into the seat, shivering slightly. John looked over at him, his face hardening as he noticed it.

"Get it out, Dean. While it's still fresh."

Dean shook his head. "I'm alright. Just another near-miss, right?"

"No. This is the sort of thing you don't try and push off, son." John frowned at him. "You thinking about what nearly happened, or what I did to them?"

"I don't have a problem with what you did." Dean closed his eyes, tipping his head back to rest against the seat. "I should have been more aware. Shouldn't've let them get me."

John sighed. "This isn't your fault, Dean. I'm the one who brought this on."

He watched his son's face, the flickering expressions that flashed across it. "Dean?"

"Yeah. I know."

But the deep resignation in his voice said something different.


	6. Chapter 6 Cape Girardeau 2006

_**Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 2006**_

* * *

Cassie stood by the river, watching the boats move slowly north and south along the broad stretch, the strong smells of the cannery cut by the scent of diesel as a boat filled her tanks at the dock.

She wondered about the last four days, the chance to say sorry, the chance to be together again. Had it been predestined? She'd kept his number, through three changes of purses; taking it out, looking at it, putting into the new purse along with the photos and her cards. What did that tell her?

And he'd come. When she'd called for help, he'd come straight away.

Whatever had been between them, back in Ohio, was as strong now as it had been then, but nothing had changed. Dean was still committed to his job, she was still committed to her life. There was no room in between those things for each other. She crossed her arms against the chill of the wind off the water and sighed.

Was there anything real there? The chemistry was real, there was no doubting that, but it didn't have anything to do with a relationship, with being able to share everything, with feeling free enough to be herself. She'd been in love, really in love, and she knew that this, this thing between them, wasn't that. She wasn't sure it could ever become that, either.

He hadn't told her much, really, about his life. There were huge chunks that he skirted around, pretending not to hear questions about them, or changing the subject, or just distracting her with a kiss or caress whenever she got too near. She thought he wanted to tell her more, but for some reason just couldn't. The same way he thought there was something deeper between them, some connection that wasn't just biology.

He was a mass of contradictions, really. He cared about her, she knew that. He was deferential to her in ways that obviously surprised his brother, Sam, which had made her wonder about the other girlfriends that Sam had seen him with. Yet he clearly called the shots with Sam. He agreed readily to being open, to being honest, but persistently avoided any conversation about his past, except the past they shared. He'd said that telling her about himself, even the small amount he had, had been a first. It would explain why he thought … what he thought about them, she supposed.

When she watched his face, lying next to him in her bed, he looked … pensive. Going over things in his mind as if he were trying to make two and two equal five. He didn't look happy, didn't look contented for even a few minutes, but he would only talk vaguely around what he was obviously thinking about so hard. She should have told him, she thought now, told him that chemistry and wanting to be with someone didn't equate necessarily to loving someone, didn't mean that what they shared was permanent or real.

When they'd been together in Ohio, and even here, there were times when all she wanted was to be with him. To not let him out of her sight, beyond her physical reach. A part of that was the sex, she knew. But a part of it wasn't. That yearning to be closer was the beginnings of something else. The problem was it couldn't get any air, couldn't develop any further without time and he'd already told her he had to go.

"Cassie."

She turned around at the deep voice behind her, and smiled at him, leaning back into him as his arms slid around her and his mouth pressed a soft kiss against the side of her neck.

"Car's parked on the other side," he said but he didn't move. She waited, knowing he wanted to say something else, was having difficulty in finding the words.

"I don't want to go," he murmured next to her ear. She nodded.

"But you have to."

She felt him pull away, slowly, reluctantly, and turned to look at him. He was looking down, that conflicted, pensive look back on his face. Two and two would never equal five, she wanted to tell him. She didn't say anything.

After a moment, he turned and she turned with him, walking next to him, both of them watching the splintery grey timbers under their feet.

He had changed, quite a lot from the last time, she realised, glancing obliquely at him as they walked, from the corner of her eye. A lot of the fun in him had gone, or perhaps had just been overridden by his life. He was still decisive, still sure of himself. He was a little harder now. He hadn't talked about the intervening years much and her primary impression was that when he was with her, he wanted to only live in the present, no past, no future, just right now.

She felt the silence growing between them, a silence full of things that they both wanted to say but couldn't. What could you say when there was no time?

As they rounded the corner of the building, they came off the wooden dock and onto the road and there was the car, shining black in the sunshine and Sam inside, waiting to get going. Subtle, she thought, ducking her head. He really was going.

"My mother said to say thanks again." She glanced at him. It was a long way from what she wanted to say but there was a pressure there now, that stopped her from talking about what was real.

He nodded absently, stopping as they came level with the car.

She looked at him, her chest tightening. "This is a better goodbye than last time."

Dean looked away, a half-smile tugging at the side of his mouth and disappearing. "Yeah, well maybe this time it will be a little less permanent."

Looking up at him, his eyes narrowed against the brilliance of the sunlight on the water beside them, she realised that it wouldn't. Her throat closed up as she saw an inkling of that knowledge in his face. Whatever it was, those feelings that were between them, it wasn't enough. It would never be enough. The thought was painful enough to bite.

"You know what?" She smiled slightly, a reflex, not a feeling. "I'm a realist. I don't see much hope for us, Dean."

She swallowed against the tears that rose suddenly with those words. She saw the small flinch at them on his face, his gaze staying on her as he fought against the knowledge she was sure he felt too.

"Well, I've seen stranger things happen." He looked down at her, pushing down at the feelings that were filling him. "A helluva lot stranger."

What did it mean when you could feel your heart breaking over something that you weren't sure had ever existed? She looked at him, watching him struggle with the feelings that showed too clearly on his face, and the sight hurt as much as what she had to say.

"Goodbye, Dean."

She didn't want to say it, not in that way, but it came out anyway. The truth, she thought much later, from somewhere deep inside of her.

"I'll see you, Cassie." It was a promise, to himself, maybe. She wondered if he knew that it was a promise he couldn't keep. "I will."

He meant it, she thought. He might or might not know that it was impossible, but he meant it. She nodded gently and stepped close to him. His arms slid around her and she kissed him softly, saying goodbye in that other way as well. Not a deep kiss, not a kiss to arouse desire, but a gentle and wanting kiss that wouldn't leave either of them with an ache, except for that ache in their hearts.

When she pulled back, she saw his vulnerability again. A longing for a different ending, and that knowledge, that no matter how much he might want things to work out, they couldn't. It was in his eyes, finally. She watched him swallow it, watched the vulnerability vanish from his face, as he ran his hand lightly down her arm and stepped back.

In that moment, the very last of her hope disappeared as well. She hadn't even known she'd felt that hope until it was gone. The hope that he might choose his feelings over his duty. He got into the car and looked at her, fingers lifting slightly as Sam started the engine.

It wasn't until they'd pulled away that she realised he'd gotten what he needed. Resolution. Closure. She glanced back at the taillights of the black car, then turned away. She'd hurt him in Ohio, and he'd been carrying that wound around with him for a long time. Now, it could heal. She rubbed her fingertips lightly over her temple, wondering if he would realise that.


	7. Chapter 7 Sioux Falls 2007

_**Sioux Falls, South Dakota 2007**_

* * *

Bobby stared at Sam, filling up the doorway, smiling down at him. He felt his heart lurch awkwardly in his chest and he turned his head slowly to look at Dean, standing behind him, his gaze fixed to the wooden porch boards. Dread rose up through Bobby like a cold, black fire.

"Hey, Bobby," Dean said to the floor at Bobby's feet.

"Hey, Bobby." Sam looked nervously at him, and Bobby pushed down at the feelings that were rising like a whirlwind inside of him, to focus on the young man.

"Sam. It's good to see... you up and around." He stood back, opening the door wider.

"Yeah, well... thanks for patching me up." Sam walked past him into the house. Bobby's gaze returned to Dean.

"Don't mention it."

Dean kept his head down, eyes on the floor as he walked quickly past Bobby, for reasons Bobby knew all too well. He stopped behind his brother and half-turned back. "Well, Sam's better. And we're back in it now, so ... what do you know?"

The shabby, comfortable living room was dim, even with the curtains opened and the lights on. Outside, the grey light was flat and thin and wasn't giving any more warmth than it did light.

Bobby followed them into the room, his teeth grinding slightly with the effort of keeping what he wanted to say and do back down under his control. Sam obviously had no idea, and Dean was pretending his ass off, and Bobby knew he'd have to get the older boy alone before he could confirm what he was afraid of.

"Well, I found something. But I'm not sure what the hell it means." He looked at them.

Sam asked. "What is it?"

"Demonic omens...like a frickin' tidal wave. Cattle deaths. Lightning storms. They skyrocketed from out of nowhere. Here." He picked up the map that was lying on the desk, turning it around and unfolding it to show the western states. Wyoming was in the centre. His finger swirled over the bulk of the state, then tapped on the southern edge. "All around here, except for one place ... southern Wyoming."

"Wyoming?"

"Yeah. That one area's totally clean - spotless. It's almost as if ...,"

Sam looked up from the map to the man. "What?"

Bobby hesitated, the thought still too big for him to want to deal with, to accept. Demons in these numbers, acting together … that was way out of his experience. Hell wasn't that organised. "The demons are surrounding it."

"But you don't know why?" Dean asked.

Bobby looked at him, and realised this was a good opportunity. Never let a good opportunity go by, he thought. "No, and by this point my eyes are swimming." He turned to Sam. "Sam, would you take a look at it? Maybe you could catch something I couldn't."

Sam frowned slightly. "Yeah, sure."

"Come on, Dean." Bobby glanced over at Dean. "I got some more books in the truck. Help me lug 'em in."

He turned without waiting for him, heading for the yard door.

* * *

It was two in the morning when he finally got to his bedroom, sinking down on the edge of the bed and staring at the wall. Ellen's arrival, and the information she'd brought had wiped everything else out and they'd spent the last few hours talking, planning, figuring out the best way to deal with the situation in Wyoming.

Now, he could think again.

_Dean._

The boy had been eight years old when Bobby had met John Winchester, and they'd teamed up for a case in Idaho. Sam had been four, and Bobby had seen Dean's devotion to his little brother, the way he'd put himself between the trickster god they'd been hunting and the little boy.

For seven years, they'd been semi-regular visitors to his house, dropped off when John needed to leave them somewhere safe as he'd tracked the yellow-eyed demon around the country. Seven years, watching them grow up, teaching Dean about cars, teaching them both about hunting and tracking, taking care of them … being a father to them, if only for short periods. He'd heard about Dean's first kiss and Sam's first hundred percent on a test, he'd comforted them through nightmares and disappointments, celebrated with them in their successes.

He'd watched Dean failing to deal with his grief, when John had sacrificed himself, watching him trying to work on the car, to pour that pain and anger and fear into the metal and leather and rubber. He wouldn't talk about it, wouldn't show it to anyone, not even his brother. Bobby remembered coming out when he'd heard the sounds of breaking glass and the shriek of metal on metal, stopping frozen in the shadows of the porch as he'd watched the young man demolish half of what he'd done on that car, one day when the pressure had gotten past what he could hold and it had spilled out, rage and pain mixed together in a destructive blast. The fury, the way he'd seemed driven, it had scared him, scared him for what being held inside of Dean, what was being locked up and never allowed out.

"_Dad brought me back, Bobby. I'm not even supposed to be here. At least this way, something good could come out of it, you know? It's like my life could mean something."_

How had Dean ever come to feel that way? He'd yelled at him, and he supposed that hadn't done much good, his stomach heaved slightly as he recalled the way the boy had flinched away from his words.

John may have put too much on them, when they were kids, especially onto his eldest, but Dean had so much to be proud of … hell, his father had been proud of him, even he knew that. Why hadn't that taken?

He looked down at his hands, twisted together on his lap. Even from a young age, the boy had been sensitive, able to see the adult emotions and cross-currents in the conversations around him, able to pick up accurately how people were feeling, and often why. God knows, John had not been able to keep his more destructive emotions under lock and key all the time, and the boys must have seen a lot more than he had of the man's anger and pain over the years of living in close quarters. Had John lashed out at Dean? _The way he lashed out at you, you mean?_ The voice in his head queried quietly. That memory was still painful, as much for what he'd done wrong in the moment as for John's bitterly cruel response.

He tipped his head back, eyes closing as he thought about what that might have done to the boy who had tried so hard to bury his own personality and be more like his father.

"_I couldn't let him die, Bobby."_

The agony in that sentence had cut him down to the quick, and he'd understood the boy's feelings, he really had. For Dean, protecting Sam was the foundation stone in his life. It shouldn't have been, but it was. Dean had no more choice in the matter than he had picking the colour of his eyes.

He got up, leaving his boots by the door and padded down the stairs in his socks. Ellen was sleeping in the guest room, Sam had the boys' old bedroom in the corner. Dean had picked the long couch in the living room.

The room was shadowed, barely lit by the fire that was dying on the hearth. Bobby walked over to the couch, unsurprised to see Dean's eyes open, his big frame hunched over at one end.

He detoured to the desk and picked up the bottle that was a permanent fixture on it, and two of the glasses they'd used earlier. The armchair sat kitty-corner to the couch, and Bobby sat down in it, setting the glasses along the arm and unscrewing the cheap bourbon's lid, pouring out a couple of fingers and passing one glass to Dean.

Dean accepted the glass and looked down into the amber depths, not meeting the older man's gaze.

"Dad told me to protect Sam," he said, very softly.

"I know." Bobby put the bottle on the floor beside him and picked up his glass, swallowing a mouthful of the raw whiskey. "He also said you might have to kill him, if the powers got too much for him."

Dean's head snapped up, his mouth parting slightly in surprise. Bobby shook his head at him.

"Me and John were close before he blew up, Dean," he said quietly. "John was driven by that demon, and he knew what was in store for Sam, for you, for himself."

He leaned forward a little in the chair. "Your dad was a strong man, Dean, stronger than most. But he made a lot of mistakes over the years, mostly with you."

He watched the young man shake his head and felt the corner of his mouth tug upwards, the smile half-resigned and utterly without humour.

"He did his best for us," Dean murmured, lifting his own glass and drinking quickly.

"Yeah. No argument." Bobby nodded. "But his best sometimes missed the mark. You protected Sam his whole life. But that ain't all you are, Dean. And you're not your dad."

Dean turned away, mouth twisting. "Doesn't leave much, Bobby."

"Leaves everything that's important, boy." Bobby reached out, gripping his forearm. "Leaves who _you_ are. And what _you_ want to be."

He saw expressions chase each other across the young man's expressive face, then saw them shut down, his eyelids dropping, that little shake preceding the duck of his head.

"Doesn't really matter anymore, does it?"

Bobby frowned, his fingers clenching around the thick glass as he struggled against the anger that surged. "Matters more than ever."

"Sam's alive." Dean looked up at him, and he wasn't surprised, only saddened to see the shimmer over the green eyes that stared into his. "And I'm okay with that."

"I know you are. What I want to know is why?" Bobby stared back at him, seeing the eight-year old still in the depths of those eyes. "Why is your life so much less important than anyone else's, Dean?"

He watched as Dean dropped his gaze again, saw him swallow several times, and finally shake his head.

"Dean." He was pushing, he knew, and sometimes that wasn't a good idea with the kid, but he had to, this time. "Dean, why?"

"I wasn't supposed to be here, Bobby." His voice, usually deep, was higher, and strained. "If I'd died when I was supposed to, back in Nebraska, none of this would have happened. Dad would have been there to protect Sam, he wouldn't have failed."

Bobby watched as he lifted his head, his breath hitching as he fought against the sob in his chest, tipping it back and wiping at the tears that spilled over the lids. Dean turned to him, the mixture of pain and regret, guilt and doubt, filling his eyes, contorting his features.

"Dad died for me, and all it did was make everything worse."

"That's a load of crap." Bobby's fingers closed tightly around Dean's arm, biting in. "He knew that you were strong, strong enough to keep fighting the demon, to look after Sam –,"

"And I didn't! I wasn't!" Dean pulled his arm free, sliding across the couch, away from Bobby. "I lost him, Bobby. I didn't – I couldn't –,"

"Son, that wasn't on you." Bobby tried to get through to him. "Your know your Dad couldn't have done any better –,"

"No, I don't know that," Dean muttered softly. "I don't know that."

He finished the whiskey in his glass and turned to look at Bobby, his face hardening, his eyes glittering suddenly with anger. "I will kill that yellow-eyed sonofabitch, Bobby, I will. And I can't think about this. I can't do my job if I think about this."

The directive was clear. Bobby let out his breath slowly. "Alright."


	8. Chapter 8 Point Judith 2007

_**Point Judith, Massachusetts 2007**_

* * *

"You get the stuff, we'll meet you at the cemetery." Dean looked at Sam, and his brother nodded.

Bela looked at him, finding it hard to reconcile the decisive man she saw in front of her with the easy-to-goad eldest Winchester she was used to. Dean turned to her, gesturing abruptly at the door.

"Let's go."

She hurried out, walking around the front of the car and getting into the passenger seat as he slid into the driver's side, watching him from the corner of her eye as he started the engine, put the car in reverse and got them onto the street and heading west.

"You're a different person when you know what you're doing."

Dean kept his eyes on the road, ignoring the inherent barb. "Lucky for you."

"Yeah." She caught her lower lip between her teeth, recognising that he wasn't going to respond to her taunts, unsure of why she was still throwing them out. "I'm sorry. I get snarky when I'm anxious."

That did get her a swift sideways glance. "You're snarky all the time."

"You're an easy target."

"Doesn't mean you have to keep firing, you know."

She looked at him, seeing his mouth twist slightly. "I'm aware."

He drove fast, and handled the car as if it were an extension of his own body, his concentration focussed, yet his awareness of the conditions spread far out. She wondered absently if he'd wanted to be a racing driver, when he'd been a little boy, before hunting had consumed his life, his dreams.

They reached the cemetery and Dean pulled into the small lot, cutting the engine and staring into the darkness. As cloud drifted overhead, the full moon appeared, dappling the car and lot under the canopy of the trees, lighting the tombstones and statues in cold white light, outlined and emphasised by the deep black shadows.

She could see him struggling with something, sitting there beside her, his gaze on the scene painted in front of them. When he finally turned his head to look at her, she wasn't surprised. No matter what she'd done, no matter what she'd said to him, she knew that at his core, in the deepest part of him, he couldn't turn away, not when he'd been asked for help.

"How could you hurt your family?" The question was soft, uncertain. A part of her was a little surprised at the disbelief in his voice. He was a hunter, and he'd seen much of the worst that lived in the world. But he was still naïve, still innocent about the things that people did to each other, with no excuse of being turned or tainted.

"Not everyone has the same family, Dean." It was as close as she could come to telling him. It was closer than she'd ever gotten before, with anyone.

He chewed on the corner of his lip, brows drawn together a little. "They're still your family, Bela."

She turned away, feeling her heart thump hard against the base of her throat. She could feel his eyes on her, his doubt and mystification. Family, she knew, was unambiguous to Dean Winchester. Her dossier on him was several inches thick, the information gathered over the last couple of years making interesting reading. But family was his touchstone, the one thing he was absolutely clear on, that he would kill or die for without a second's hesitation.

She couldn't talk about hers. Or her past. Or her memories. She couldn't ever explain to him that people who were monsters also had families. He might have understood, she thought. He was one of a very few who had pushed a little at her, wanted to know why. But she couldn't let it out of the locked room she kept it in, the room that kept her sane, most of the time. Not without a good reason, not without a reason that would override her reactions.

She heard him draw in a deep breath, his jacket whispering against the seat as he shifted his position, turning away, looking outside again, and she closed her eyes.

She was aware that she had been pushing at him since they'd met. Taking the rabbit's foot, taking his winnings from the luck that had brought him, shooting his brother even. Nothing she'd done had made him push back hard enough. Hard enough to break through, to make her fear him more than her past. He was, she thought with a hint of derision, a good guy. And perhaps, in spite of his interest, in spite of the compassion that seemed to drive him sometimes, he was private in the same way she was, and couldn't bring himself to go that extra mile.

She wondered what it would take, to push him there. More than what she'd already done. Her time was running out. And his too. But she couldn't ask. She couldn't tell him, or anyone, without something to overcome the fear, something more frightening to help her face it.

If Sam's spell didn't work tonight, it would all be too late. She would hear the hounds coming for her soul the minute she drowned. Dean and Sam wouldn't. They wouldn't know about the deal, about the truth. She didn't know why that mattered to her, not now, but for some reason it did.

"What's the most frightening that ever happened to you?" She turned back to him, seeing him start slightly at the sudden question.

He glanced at her and away again. "Losing my mom."

"You lost everything that night, didn't you?" She didn't know why she was asking. She knew his history, knew what had happened.

He frowned, turning slowly to look at her. "How do you know about that?"

"People talk. It's not difficult to find out things if you've got time and money and patience." She shrugged.

"Why would you want to?"

She smiled slightly. "I find out everything about anyone I have dealings with, Dean. It's just habit."

The dark brows drew closer together. "We don't have 'dealings', Bela."

"Are you going to answer the question or quibble semantics, Dean?" She crossed her legs, watching him.

"I'll answer yours if you answer mine," he said, and she could see that it bothered him, both that he wanted an answer and that he was reaching out to her. He didn't know why either, she thought.

"I can't." She looked down. "I'm sorry, but I can't."

"Right." Disbelief evident in his voice now. "I don't know why I even try to talk to you."

"There's a part of you that wants to believe that I can be saved, changed," she said.

The silence between grew, and she knew without having to look at him, that she'd gotten that right, and she'd surprised him.

"Why would I care about saving you, Bela?"

His voice was very soft, and she looked over at him, meeting his eyes. "I don't know."

He looked away. She sighed softly. He was the right one, maybe the only one who would be able to break through, but he hid things from himself, didn't look at the things that made him uncomfortable, or try and work out why that was. The deal, or maybe the decision to make the deal, had changed something in the way he saw himself. She'd seen it in him, that odd lack of decisiveness when it came to anything that might go either way. Until tonight she hadn't seen what he must have been like before that moment, clear in his head about what had to be done, unafraid of doing it. She wondered if she'd met him before, if he'd have pushed harder when she pushed at him.

The thought was irrelevant and she dropped it. He was as he was.

"Life doesn't work out the way we expect it to, does it?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" he asked, his voice edged with suspicion again.

"Nothing." She shook her head. "I just mean, for a long time I tried to live without regrets, but now, I find I have a few."

"Didn't think you knew the meaning of the word." He looked at her. "Or remorse."

"That's right, Dean, I don't," she snapped at him, irritated with him again. "What about you? Do you regret that your father made a deal and went to Hell so that you could live?"

He moved so fast that she didn't have time to get an arm up or do anything other than cower under him, staring into his eyes that were only a few inches from her own, as his forearm pressed hard against her throat, and she heard the harsh rasp of his breath in his throat.

"How the fuck do you know that, Bela?"

"The spirits talk, Dean. I know a lot about a lot of things." She dragged in a little air, fighting to get enough past the pressure of his grip.

_Was this the moment?_ She could feel her heart racing in her chest, feel the adrenalin coursing through her body. If he pushed her now, would she finally be able to answer him?

She wanted to cry when she heard his breathing change, slow and soften, the pressure against her throat easing off as he moved away from her. _No, you were so close, so goddamned bloody close_, the thought was a like a scream inside of her.

"Why would you want to push me, Bela?" He watched her narrowly, and she straightened up, applauding his suspicions even as she raged against his control.

"Some things need pushing to see the light of day, Dean." She rubbed her fingertips over the soreness on her neck. "Sometimes we all need a hard push, to get past whatever we're afraid of."

He frowned at her, clearly not understanding what she was talking about, or perhaps not wanting to.

"Never mind." She turned her head, as the splash of headlights came down the road. "Your brother's here."

He glanced behind her, through the rear windows. "Let's get this over with."


	9. Chapter 9 South Bend 2008

_**South Bend, Indiana, January 2008**_

* * *

She watched him from the shadows, standing in the parking lot. She saw him draw in a deep breath, and let it out, and knew what he was thinking. Fresh air. Free air. _You can't breathe in enough to last you for eternity_, she thought.

The lights flickered and went out, flickered again and came back on, he turned toward her and she knew he'd seen her, standing there. He walked toward her slowly, a little wary, a little puzzled, a lot confused.

"So the devil may care after all, is that what I'm supposed to believe?" He stopped on the concrete walkway, looking at her. Dean Winchester. She'd been watching them both for a while now. Dean was the key to Sam. And Sam was the key to Dean. And Dean would be a tough nut to crack. Unlike his younger brother, Dean had a wide streak of suspicion, running right through him. Trust had to be earned with him, it was never just given.

"I don't believe in the devil," Ruby said lightly.

"Wacky night." He walked down the steps toward her, and she could feel his suspicions of her, rising off him like fog off a river. "So let me get this straight, you were human once, you died, you went to hell, you became a ..."

"Yeah."

She turned away and started walking, listening for him behind her.

"How long ago?"

She took another step and stopped, knowing that he was at least half-way hooked now. The thing with Dean was that under the growling, scowling exterior, there was another man. A man of unimaginable depths, who had no idea as to who he really was. He'd spent too many years trying to become someone else to know. He felt everything, and he felt it deeply. He saw things, connected things, sensed things but had no framework to set those insights to work. And he was afraid of what he could feel, when it didn't relate to getting the job done.

"Back when the plague was big."

Dean walked slowly toward her. She could hear the scrape of the asphalt under his boots, the rustle of his clothing, getting closer.

"So all of 'em, every damn demon, they were all human once?" he said it as if he were just checking the facts, but she knew he was stalling, for time, time to think about it, time to relate to it.

Ruby turned, softening her voice. "Every one I've ever met."

"Well, they sure don't act like it."

He didn't like talking to her, she knew. He didn't like demons, period. And he couldn't understand what had motivated her to save his life, not just this time either, but all the other times as well. And he really didn't like that, not knowing why she did what she did for them. The obvious explanation just wasn't flying to this man. It wasn't rational and it wasn't logical, and he wasn't either. She needed to meet him on an emotional level.

She looked up at him, knowing that this time, this moment, was the critical one. If she could get him to believe her, get him to – well, not trust her, because that was an impossibility for him – understand that she had goals that aligned with theirs, he would be her most important ally with Sam. "Most of them have forgotten what it means, or even that they were. That's what happens when you go to hell, Dean. That's what hell is. Forgetting what you were."

He looked away, and she could see that at least half of him believed, despite the rolled eyes, the derisive expression. For the first time, perhaps, he was letting himself think about it.

"Philosophy lesson from the demon, I'll pass, thanks." He retreated back into that smart-ass mode that had protected him to this point from the thoughts of things he didn't like.

"It's not philosophy. It's not a metaphor." She stared into his eyes, watching the words sink into him, watching him take it in. "There's a real fire in the pit, agonies you can't even imagine."

He was listening, when she was talking. The cocky attitude was still there. "No, I saw Hellraiser, I get the gist."

She turned away again, walking a few more steps. "Actually they got that pretty close, except for all the custom leather."

Behind her, he stood still and she walked a little further, then stopped, turning back to him. His face was no longer shuttered, everything hidden. She saw fear and as if he felt that, he looked up at her, the wariness immediately returning.

"The answer is yes by the way."

"I'm sorry?"

"Yes, the same thing will happen to you." She watched that cocky expression vanish, his eyes narrow. "It might take centuries, but sooner or later hell will burn away your humanity. Every hellbound soul, every one, turns into something else." He was listening now, and thinking. "Turns you into us, so yeah, yeah you can count on it."

Dean looked away, his mouth lifting at one corner, as he finally asked the question that he needed the answer to, and already knew. "There's no way of saving me from the pit, is there?"

Ruby looked at him. He still had hope, she saw. Not much hope but there was still a flicker left in him. He appreciated honesty, and he already feared the worst. It was a risk but a calculated one. "No."

He nodded, and she watched the tiny hope disappear from him, his eyes cutting away as he walked toward her again. "Then why'd you tell Sam you could?"

"So he would talk to me. You Winchesters can be pretty bigoted. I needed something to help him get past the –,"

"The demon thing?" His brows drew together, pushing the disappointment down, pushing it aside. She watched him do it. "It's pretty hard to get past."

She smiled, at the change in his voice, in his expression, the suspicion back. "Look at you." Big brother, she thought, protective, tough, trying to get intel for his brother. And underneath that, a spreading fear. "Trying to be all stoic. My god, it's heartbreaking."

Dean's gaze cut away, she could see the irritation at her words, the not-so-subtle patronisation bringing him back to the conversation, back to where she needed him to be. "Why are you telling me all this?"

"I need your help," Ruby said quietly.

"Help with what?" he snapped at her. It was amazing, she thought, he could sense the trap, no matter how well hidden it was. The only way to blunt those instincts was to confuse them.

"With Sam."

He exhaled sharply, turning away and back to her, his suspicions confirmed. She gave him a minute to think he had it all figured out, then she continued. "The way you stuck that demon tonight, it was pretty tough. Sam's almost there, but not quite, you need to help me get him ready." She paused, watching his eyes. "For life without you; to fight this war on his own."

And there it was. That realisation of what she was talking about. No big brother around to protect Sam. No one to watch his back. No one to turn to if the fight got too big for him. Alone.

Sometime, she thought, he would also think about the other side of that equation. Where he'd be. What that might be like. How it would feel. But for the moment, it was enough that he realised what life would be like for Sam. Without him.

She turned away, walking steadily away from him, leaving him to think it through.

"Ruby."

She stopped, her back to him and waited. He'd come to the right conclusion more quickly than she'd thought he would.

"Why do you want us to win?"

She turned back to him slowly. The next part was the hardest, harder than dropping the baited hook, harder than letting him play with it. He needed to have a reason to believe her. And it needed to be an emotional reason, one that he could feel, without having to think about it. He was a fascinating man, really. Contradictions piled on contradictions. He could be hard. But the man he didn't know, the one he'd repressed, was strong, rather than hard. And sensitive. And possessed of an extraordinary imagination. It would all work against him, when he went downstairs, she knew. It would tear him apart and they would drink his pain.

"Isn't it obvious?" She looked away, brows drawing together as if the realisations were new and immediate. "I'm not like them, I- I don't know why, I wish I was, but I'm not." She drew in a deep breath and looked back at him. "I remember what it's like."

"What what's like?"

"Being human."

She watched his face change, the compassion that was always there, even when he did his best to hide it, surfacing. The difference for Dean between a monster and a human, it was a wide gap. Most monsters had started out human, but it was still a card that could work with him. _As you are now, so once was I, as I am now so shall you be_. She'd been human. He would become a demon. She thought it was enough.


	10. Chapter 10 Pontiac 2008

_**Pontiac, Illinois, September 2008**_

* * *

Castiel stood on the grass verge, staring at the red-roofed barn on the other side of the two-lane asphalt road. A summoning. For him.

He sighed softly. Obedience to Heaven, to his Father, in all things, in all times. This was his assignment and he would see it through, as he had all the others, even when he'd been sure he would not survive them. Faith was a strange construct. It gave as it took. And he was still alive.

He approached the doors, feeling the men inside, their fear and their doubts. He was, as yet, imperfectly enclosed by his vessel, and the energies that should have been dormant and quiescent inside the flesh and bone and nerves still escaped. Above him the loose sheets of the tin roof began to bang and lift, slamming against the rafters as that energy shot out in different directions. He felt for the bar that held the doors shut and watched it slide free, the doors transparent to his gaze.

In earlier, simpler times, he could have manifested as a light, or a fire. Mankind's ability to process the fantastical appeared to have shrunk as the millennia passed, however. And as he became aware of the seething emotions filling the men at the end of the building, he acknowledged that the human vessel was a less-threatening visage in which to introduce himself.

The nimbus of energy surrounding him overloaded each of the overhead lights as he passed under them, walking steadily forward. He could see them now, with his vessel's eyes, two men clutching at their puny weapons, hear their hearts accelerating in their chest cavities, their breathing rasping in and out of their lungs. He was aware of the shots that they fired at him, the small pieces of metal tearing up the fabric of his vessel's garments but disintegrating before they penetrated the inner layers.

When they looked at each other, and dropped their guns, he thought they might have given up. It was a forlorn hope really. After two thousand years of watching humankind, he should have realised that they weren't ready to give up just yet.

"Who are you?" Dean Winchester circled around, and Castiel turned with him, his back to the other man.

"I'm the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition." He looked at the man in front of him, seeing fear in his eyes. Why was he so afraid? He stood there, alive and in his body because of what had been done for him.

"Yeah. Thanks for that."

He pulled his arm back and the knife hissed through the air, ending its downward plunge in the angel's chest. Man and angel looked down at the knife hilt, incongruous against the waterproofed material of the coat, for a long moment.

Castiel raised his head and looked at Dean, his hand curling around the bone hilt and pulling the knife free, letting it go. He could, perhaps, understand the impulse. Fear was a powerful driver and he hadn't been able to establish contact with this man until now.

Dean stared at him as the metal clanged on the concrete floor. He exchanged a brief glance with the other man, standing behind the angel. The older man swung the crowbar. Without turning to look, Castiel caught the end, turning and inexorably drawing the older man to him. He touched his forehead with his fingertips and the man crumpled to the ground, unconscious.

"We need to talk, Dean," Castiel said quietly, glancing down at the still form on the floor briefly. "Alone."

He watched Dean as he walked warily around him, going to the other man. He turned away, and looked down at the nearby table, seeing the bowls and herbs they'd used to summon him. Cantrips and granny magic, he thought.

Crouching beside Bobby, his fingers resting on his neck, Dean turned his head and watched the angel, who stood by the table, flicking through Bobby's journal curiously.

"Your friend's alive." The tone left no doubt that it was only by the angel's mercy that was the case.

"Who are you?" Dean asked.

"Castiel."

"Yeah, I figured that much, I mean what are you?"

Castiel turned to look at him. "I'm an angel of the Lord."

Dean was silent for a long moment, getting slowly to his feet as he looked at the angel. "Get the hell out of here. There's no such thing."

It might have been slightly funny, in other circumstances, the angel thought. Brought up as a hunter of the supernatural, tortured by demons, raised from Hell … and the man didn't believe in the powers of Heaven, only those of evil.

"This is your problem, Dean." Castiel stared into his eyes. "You have no faith."

The angel's eyes widened slightly and lightning coruscated through the open door, accompanied by a peal of thunder. Dean's eyes widened as he saw the shadows behind the angel, the shadows of wings extending up and outwards, wings that spanned the width of the barn and lapped around the walls. The light died and the shadows disappeared.

Castiel watched Dean's bravado disappear for a moment, watched him accept, for the moment anyway, the proof of his own eyes. He was surprised and disappointed to see that acceptance buried a moment later.

"Some angel you are." Dean's mouth twisted. "You burned out that poor woman's eyes."

Castiel bowed his head. The woman had persisted. It was unfortunate. "I warned her not to spy on my true form. It can be ... overwhelming to humans, and so can my real voice. But you already knew that."

"You mean the gas station and the motel." Dean remembered the intensity of the sound – not even a sound, really – that had drilled into his brain. "That was you talking?"

The angel nodded slightly. It had been disappointing to realise that the man he'd saved, had drawn from the fires of Hell, had only been traumatised and injured by his attempts to speak to him.

"Buddy, next time, lower the volume," Dean advised.

Castiel dropped his gaze, acknowledging the error. "That was my mistake." He looked back to Dean. "Certain people, special people, can perceive my true visage. I thought you would be one of them. I was wrong."

He thought it would reassure the man in front of him, calm him. Unfortunately it seemed to have the opposite effect. Castiel watched him drag back the shreds of his earlier confidence, his earlier anger. After Hell, this man's armour against what he didn't want to know was thinner. He couldn't hide himself so well. And that made him more afraid.

"And what visage are you in now, huh?" The words were almost spat out. The angel sighed inwardly. "What, holy tax accountant?"

Castiel looked down at the body he wore, his fingers rising to the lapels of the trenchcoat. Jimmy Novak's body, his soul nestled safely in the lattices of Castiel's mind. "This? This is... a vessel."

"You're possessing some poor bastard?" Dean stared at him incredulously.

Castiel softened his voice. He could feel the man's unease, the choice of words bringing connotations of Hell too close again. "He's a devout man, he actually prayed for this."

"Well, I'm not buying what you're selling, so who are you really?"

Looking at him, seeing the jaw muscles clench and twitch, the tension in his body increasing as the conversation continued, Castiel realised belatedly that Dean was afraid. Not of him physically, but of the unknown quantity that he represented. He couldn't think of what Dean thought he might be.

The angel looked at him, brows drawing together slightly. "I told you."

"Right. And why would an angel rescue me from Hell?"

He was almost shaking now, not knowing what to believe, not knowing what to think. Castiel walked to him slowly, wondering how to get through to this man, who believed in demons, but not in their opposites.

"Good things do happen, Dean," he spoke gently.

The man was silent, and Castiel knew what thoughts flowed through his mind. He watched as Dean's face tightened. "Not in my experience."

"What's the matter?" Castiel looked at him, seeing doubt and fear, and the anger that those emotions had raised defensively. So much pain in this man. So much doubt. And so much … self-hatred. "You don't think you deserve to be saved."

Memory crowding the darkened eyes. A heart accelerating wildly in the chest. He watched Dean struggle for control over his feelings, over his thoughts. Was it just that he'd been in Hell, and the experience was still fresh in his mind? Or did it go deeper, to a lifetime of doubt?

"Why'd you do it?" The words came out fast, as if Dean was barely holding himself back from screaming.

Castiel remembered the summoning, remembered the archangel standing beside him, and the gathering of the Host, and the dark and confusion and the stench of Hell.

"Because God commanded it." The angel's dark blue eyes bored into the man's, and again the muscles in Dean's face twitched and jumped, his fear palpable beyond the paper thin control he had over himself.

"Because we have work for you."

He watched fear turn to disbelief, and understood, a little more anyway. Torture and pain. The human imagination. This man's imagination. He wondered if Dean would ever be able to trust in anything again. If, to him, things would always get worse, never better. Dean had been waiting to hear that this was a reprieve, not an end to the torture. That he had some task he was needed for on earth, some Hell-related job, his imagination working with what he knew to produce scenarios of ever-lasting damnation.

Plainly, he had never considered that another power might require him. Castiel watched his face, disbelief chased by doubt, the expressions flitting across lightning fast. Inside, deeper, there was denial. A powerful denial. The angel knew what had been done to this man. And he knew what he had done to others. Dean had no faith, no belief in anything other than the strong moral code he'd been born with. What he'd done, in his eyes, had forever marked him. Had blackened his soul. Had damned him beyond the possibility of redemption.

It wasn't true. But he could see that it would take a lot more than words to convince this man of that.


	11. Chapter 11 Riverton 2009

_**Riverton, Wyoming, March 2009**_

* * *

Alastair spat out the blood and water that filled his mouth, stretching back against the timber frame. His mind slid through the vessel's body, assessing the damage. It was minor, really. Not that Dean wasn't trying, the boy was doing his best and, he admitted, had come up with a couple of truly interesting twists on the standard practices. But …

"You're just not getting deep enough." He looked down at Dean's face, hiding the satisfaction that bloomed as he saw the uncertainty in it. "Well, you lack the resources. Reality is just, I don't know, too concrete up here."

_And you don't know how to see the weaknesses here, Dean,_ he thought. The weaknesses that were all too apparent to him, looking at Dean in his body, that expressive face giving away all of the young man's secrets. And it was delicious, as piquant and tangy as a freshly slaughtered innocent, to torture the torturer and to see the cuts go deeper and further with every word.

"Honestly, Dean … you have no idea how bad it really was … and what you really did for us." He watched Dean pour salt into the long soft funnel of the piping bag, choosing his words carefully, aiming for those soft spots he could still see so clearly. Dean was afraid to be here, afraid to cut too deeply, lest he remember how much he enjoyed it, how addictive drawing the pain out was, how it had seduced him to greater darknesses. He was trying to hold onto himself, to keep that addiction down and inside, and he couldn't make himself push past the fear that if he went too far, he would be a monster before he'd finished.

"Shut up."

Alastair felt the change between them then. Heard the thread of fear in the whispered words. The first real crack in Dean's armour. "The whole, bloody thing, Dean. The reason Lilith wanted you there in the first place –,"

"Well, then I'll just make you shut up." Dean crossed the distance between them, and gripped Alastair's jaw, his fingers driving into the muscles and forcing the demon's mouth open.

"Lilith really –,"

The salt poured down into his mouth, filling his throat, cascading into his organs. The piping bag was a nice touch, he thought, as he struggled against his vessel's asphyxiation, and shunted the crawling pain of the salt infusing its membranes far from his consciousness. Dean's imagination had always been up to the challenge of finding new ways to inflict agony. And the bonus had been that the more he'd immersed himself in the pain of others, the more pain he'd felt himself. Win-win, Alastair remembered.

As Dean pulled the bag away, he coughed up the remains from the torn and bloody inside of his throat, feeling it drip off his chin.

"Something caught in my throat." He coughed up the moistened mess of salt and flesh from deeper down. "I think it's my throat."

Dean leaned close to him, and Alastair could see that he knew that hadn't gone any deeper than anything else he'd tried. Dean couldn't see the weaknesses. He couldn't see the fears up here. He couldn't get past the flesh and bone and blood. Alastair inhaled deeply, breathing in the fear and doubt that emanated from the man. He would never get deep enough, he thought. The toughest barrier was his own humanity.

"Well, strap in, 'cause I'm just starting to have fun." He turned away, walking back to the cart, and the demon saw the lines of uncertainty in the set of his shoulders, in the carelessness of his actions as he slapped the bag down.

"You know, it was supposed to be your father," Alastair said conversationally, watching him pour more holy water into the cup, feeling that dark thrill coursing through him as he structured the next few minutes in his mind. How it would feel to push this knife deep into Dean. How the man would feel when realisation hit … and everything he'd feared about himself turned out to be … true. "He was supposed to bring it on. But, in the end, it was you."

Dean didn't look up at the demon. "Bring what on?"

"Oh, every night, the same offer, remember?" He glanced at him. "Same as your father."

Dean was fiddling with the knife again, and not even noticing that his so-called victim was standing upright, unbowed and unbroken, and not to put too fine a point on it, almost gleeful. "And finally you said, _"Sign me up."_ Oh, the first time you picked up my razor ..."

Alastair watched the memories return to Dean, knowing what they were, remembering with his student. Pain was pain, whether it was your own or someone else's, it was like blood. You could drink your own or you could catch it in cups from the dripping pipes of another, but it all felt the same as it went down the hatch. He watched Dean's movements slow, his body still. "The first time you sliced into that weeping bitch ...,"

Watched as Dean turned to him finally, and he could look into his eyes, savouring this moment, tasting it, feeling it. "That was the first seal."

It was perfect. He saw the ever-so-slight widening of Dean's eyes, as the words sunk in, sunk deep. He saw Dean's control tighten, over his expression, over his thoughts, but too late. As always, too late. The acid was inside him now, eating its way down, through all the things that Dean still held to, through all the things that were keeping him sane.

Dean walked up to Alastair, his mouth twisting into a slight curve. "You're lying."

The demon stared into Dean's eyes. "And it is written that the first seal shall be broken when a righteous man sheds blood in hell. As he breaks, so shall it break."

He allowed himself the smallest of smiles as he watched the face of the man in front of him, and drank the pain that seeped out past Dean's control. He saw that pain building as Dean turned abruptly away, walking back to the cart and stopping.

_Oh but there's more, Dean, there's so much more_, he thought. "We had to break the first seal before any others. Only way to get the dominoes to fall, right? Topple the one at the front of the line."

Pain visible in the tension in that body. In the gradual tightening of the muscles of the shoulders and back and chest. In the heartbeat, increasing as shock started to shut off the nerve connections between muscle and brain. In the fine trembling he could perceive, rattling through Dean's frame as he struggled to contain what he was hearing, what he was feeling. Pain. And more pain.

"When we win, when we bring on the apocalypse and burn this earth down, we'll owe it all to you, Dean Winchester."

_And that, son, is how you torture someone_, Alastair thought, the frisson of pleasure trembling through his vessel, wiping out the physical pain, overriding everything. He couldn't see Dean's face anymore, but he didn't need to. He could feel the pain rolling through the man, and he knew Dean. Knew him inside and out. Knew that he could no more take the weight of what had just been dropped on him than he could fly.

He'd always had that sneaking suspicion that in his time in Hell, Dean had had a way to hold onto more than he was letting on. Keeping some part of himself secret and safe, away from what he forced himself to do every day. He couldn't criticise the relish the man had shown in his duties, but he'd sensed that it wasn't all of Dean, wielding the razor and inflicting the torment. He could see it more clearly up here, that part that hadn't gone untouched, by any means, but had remained somehow intact. He hadn't really carved Dean into a new animal, he realised. It didn't matter, not now, not to him. It might have mattered to Dean, but he wasn't going to tell him. Dean would torture himself for the rest of his life with the thought of what he'd done down in the flames and brimstone, the horror of what he thought he'd become. And that, in the end, was more than satisfactory.

"Believe me, son, I wouldn't lie about this. It's kind of a –," Alastair looked to his left, hearing a faint noise. From the pipe above, another drip grew full and fell. It hit the clean spot in the rim of the chalked circle, the broken edge of the trap. "– religious sort of thing with me."

"No. I don't think you are lying. But even if the demons do win," Dean glanced down at the wickedly serrated blade in his hand. "You won't be there to see it."

He turned around. Alastair watched his eyes widen.

"You should talk to your plumber about the pipes."


	12. Chapter 12 River Pass 2009

_**River Pass, Colorado, September 2009**_

* * *

Ellen ran up the stairs, cursing the fact that she'd left the pump action down there, that she had a knife and her .38 Special and that was it. She could hear the pounding of Dean's feet behind her, and she pushed herself harder, faster, not wanting him shot in the back because she'd been too goddamned slow.

They shot out of the church, onto the bright sunlit street, and Ellen veered right, cutting across the lawn of a house three up, and over the yard fence, crossing two more yards before she found the place she remembered, the little weatherboard house with the rental notice on its gate.

They jogged around to the back door, and Dean slid his jacket down over one arm, wrapping it around his forearm and hand before he smashed the small square pane above the door knob.

He took point and they worked the house, checking all the rooms, even the basement, before returning to the kitchen.

"Well, we know who War is." Dean shook the glass fragments in his jacket out, pulling it back on and sitting at the small table.

"Yeah but we can't take him by ourselves, not just you and me." Ellen looked through the cupboards, finding a couple of thick jelly glasses and taking them to the sink. She filled them with water and handed one to Dean. "And we have to tell Jo and Rufus, get Sam back."

"No argument." Dean drank the water down in a couple of swallows, wiping his mouth as he looked around. "Sound to you like War was getting bored with the status quo, wanted to get things moving again?"

"Sure did." She closed her eyes and tipped her head back. "The Horsemen, Dean. The Four Horsemen."

"Yeah. The party never stops." He got up to refill his glass, and Ellen opened her eyes, turning her head to watch him.

"What happened to you, Dean?"

He turned off the tap, and turned around slowly, his gaze cutting away. "Nothing. I'm fine."

At any other time, she might have taken that warning seriously, might have backed off and left him to figure it out on his own. But not this time. It had been almost two years since she'd seen him last, and she couldn't believe how much he'd changed, how much they'd both changed, him and Sam. He wouldn't have waited to get someone else's advice, wouldn't have needed anyone else's advice or wanted it then. Something had gone out of him and she couldn't work out what it was. But he needed to get it figured out, because right now good leaders were thin on the ground, and she had to know if she could trust him.

"You figured out what was going on real fast, once you had the kick in the ass to get you going. Since when have you doubted your own ability to work out a course of action, Dean?"

He looked away, mouth twisting slightly and she saw the defensiveness rise in him, then fall away, as if he couldn't be bothered pretending any longer. "A lot happened, since we saw you the last time, Ellen."

"Yeah, I get that." Ellen saw the nervousness in him, the first time she'd seen that, aside from the ride back from Chicago. But that had been different. "Bobby told me a little. About going to Hell. And coming back. About Sam and the devil rising."

He looked down, licking his lips. "Well, he shouldn't have."

"You made it back, Dean."

His mouth lifted at one corner, humourlessly. "No one makes it back, Ellen."

Whatever had happened to him, it had taken his confidence and it had taken his recklessness, but it hadn't taken the core of him, she thought. Watching him earlier, in the church, seeing his need to find Sam, to get him out, overruled by the responsibility he'd taken on for the people in that room, the people who were depending on him to get them out of the town safely, that had been clear. The silence between them grew longer and louder and she thought he wasn't going to talk at all, then he lifted his head and looked at her.

"I've made a lot of crap decisions lately, Ellen." He picked up the full glass and drank a little, carrying it back to the table and sitting down opposite her. "I don't … I'm not …,"

He looked down at the top of the table, a scratched and cheap laminate top in a faded pattern that might have been supposed to resemble marble.

In the afternoon light, shining through the small and dirty window, the kitchen seemed warm and peaceful. Except for the man sitting across from her. He looked like someone with the weight of the world on his shoulders, a weight that had teeth, not just bowing him down, but eating him from the inside. It wasn't really tiredness that had left the shadows around his eyes, although he looked tired. It went deeper, she thought, a loss of something that had been a cornerstone to him.

"What happened between you and Sam?" she asked softly. He glanced at her and away, that slight lift of the corner of his mouth there again before vanishing.

"Sam made a choice." He shrugged. "The wrong choice."

She watched the expressions cross his face, and realised that whatever that choice had been, that was what had done it – or at least, it was a big part of it. He lifted his head, meeting her eyes briefly then looking away again, rubbing his fingers over his forehead slowly.

"I-I don't think … I don't know how to trust him now," he said, and made a small noise, somewhere between a snort and a cough, not really either. "I don't know how to trust anyone anymore."

She saw his eyes lose focus, his attention turning inward. She wanted to smack him upside the head, bring him back, tell him to leave the past in the past and get on with what was going on right now, but she knew that wouldn't help, wouldn't do anything but encourage him to bury whatever had happened to him even further. Not looking at things, pretending that they hadn't happened, wasn't a good long term strategy for people in their life. Sooner or later those things would rise up and he'd be forced to deal with them, and they would be distorted by that time, distorted and festering and poisonous.

She and Jo had stayed with Bobby for a few months after Wyoming, before they'd found their own place again. Near the end of that time, Bobby had shown her Jim Murphy's journal, and in it had been a revelation that had almost destroyed her, but had, in the end, saved her. She still felt regret for all the years that she'd shut out John Winchester, believing what he'd told her, believing that her life had been shattered by him. It wasn't until the poison of that belief had finally been drained, that she'd realised how much it had shaped her over the years.

She didn't want to see his son shaped by the poisons of what had happened to him, all the things he might be believing about himself, not if she could stop it. She owed that to John.

"You're a good hunter, Dean," she said slowly. "I've watched you, seen you think through things before you barrel in.

He lifted his head to look at her, his face losing that inward expression. "But?"

"But you're second-guessing yourself." She leaned her chin on her elbow, looking at him. "You don't trust yourself now."

He looked away. "No."

"You got a bad deal? We all got bad deals, hon." She leaned back. "We all made stupid mistakes and lost people and did things we wished we hadn't."

She saw a flash of anger in his eyes, and thought he was going to throw it out at her, what had happened, why it was worse for him, but at the last second, he closed his mouth, glowering at her instead.

She smiled. "Doesn't matter what it was, Dean. The only thing that matters is that you understand what it did."

He looked around the room restlessly. Again she had the impression that he wanted to say something, but that he couldn't. He looked back at her.

"What's the worst thing you've done, Ellen?" he asked her, the words edged with a very faint contempt, as if he couldn't imagine anything too bad. She looked at him.

"Worst thing I did was believe your dad's story about what happened to my Bill," she said bluntly. "Believed it and trashed our friendship, and poisoned myself with it for fourteen years."

He stared at her.

"I knew Bill'd had a fling, when he went south for that hunt. Man couldn't keep a secret like that, everything showed on his face." She looked down into her glass, hands curling around it, lips twisting slightly. "Didn't know there was a child from it, but I could have lived with that, better than living without him."

She raised her head, meeting Dean's eyes. "Bill made John promise not to tell me what really happened. And your dad kept his promise, put the blame on himself, knowing he would probably lose us as well as Bill from it."

"It took me a long time to figure out how much I changed from believing that." She looked out the window. "Partly because I was too busy worrying about Jo to take the time to work it out, partly because I was too afraid to see how much damage had been done, too afraid to face up to it."

Her attention sharpened as she noticed the sun's position through the grubby glass. "We should head out soon."

He nodded slowly. "You couldn't have known, Ellen, not if Dad lied about it."

"No." She looked back at him. "But when I did find out, it would have gone a lot quicker if I'd made the time to get it sorted, instead of pretending it would sort itself."

His gaze dropped to the tabletop, and she watched him thinking that over. Whatever had happened, between him and Sam, it would be better if he could get it clear now, not just bury it with the rest. She thought he might, if they made it through this, and no new threat appeared too quickly. Not that that was all that likely.

"We need you, Dean. What's coming … we really need you."


	13. Chapter 13 Lawrence 2010

_**Lawrence, Kansas, May 2010**_

* * *

The rumble of the engine caught his attention, and Michael's, the two of them turning in unison to see the black car come up over the hill, music blaring from the open window, the leather-clad arm protruding insouciantly from the door.

_Dean._

Goddamned single-track, co-dependent, whining, endlessly resurrected, moronic brother of his vessel. He'd seen terriers who were less obsessed. He'd seen obsessive-compulsives who were less obsessed than this man.

He'd tried to keep Sam happy. Tried to ignore the insults and the smart-ass comments and the outright rudeness, his patience wearing thinner and thinner as time went by. He felt the sharp thrust of hope from the soul bound within the vessel, as the man got out of the car, leaning on the roof and door, and looked from him to Michael and back again.

"Howdy, boys." Dean's eyes narrowed against the flat glare. "Sorry. Am I interrupting something?"

He shut the car door and walked toward them. "Hey, we need to talk."

Lucifer looked at Michael, and felt his rage, barely held in all this time, begin to ferment.

"Dean." Lucifer looked out of Sam's eyes at his brother. Sam's brother. Sam's soon-to-be-dead brother. "Even for you, this is a whole new mountain of stupid."

"I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to Sam."

Lucifer felt himself glowing at the insolence. The monkey had upped the ante and sorry, Sammy, but your brother is going to pay for everything, over three thousand years of pent-up rage had to get a release somehow. He could feel Sam beating weakly against his control.

* * *

He watched in disbelief as Michael exploded into flame, and disappeared, turning slowly to face the angel who'd thrown the bottle.

"Castiel. Did you just molotov my brother with holy fire?" It was getting harder and harder to maintain a calm façade. No low-ranked seraphim would have even dreamt of attacking an arch in the old days. It was time to remind them of that, perhaps.

"Uh ...," The angel backed away, hands rising appeasingly. "No."

"No one dicks with Michael but me," Lucifer said softly, snapping his fingers. Blood, flesh, bone … pulverised and shredded, burst outward in a cloud of red, coating the other human who'd come with the seraphim.

"Sammy, can you hear me?" Dean took two steps toward him, and he turned back, eyes narrowing at the aggravating insolence of this man. Inside the vessel, locked deep down, Sam was frantic, hammering the walls that held him, desperate, silently screaming.

"You know ... I tried to be nice ... for Sammy's sake. But you –," Lucifer's hands reached out, closing and tightening on the lapels of the leather jacket, "– were such a pain... in my ass." He lifted Dean and threw him over the hood of the black car, into the windshield.

The gunshot was loud in the quiet field, hitting him high in the back of the shoulder with the first shot. Lucifer turned slowly again, looking at the human behind him, as the second shot ploughed into his chest. He looked down at the wound, the round black hole through the jacket running with Sam's blood. He lifted his hand and snapped his wrist in a semi-circle and the human's head spun, the sound of the break in the spine almost as distinct as the shots had been.

"No!" Dean's anguished shout from the hood brought his attention back to what he'd been doing. He strode to the car, gripping the man's ankles and yanking him down the smooth, black metal.

"Yes."

The first blow felt liberating, drawing first blood, the sting in his hand sending a frisson of anticipation through him. He waited for Dean to straighten up, to turn back to him, waited for him to beg and plead for his life.

"Sammy? Are you in there?" Dean's voice was low and gentle, but insistent.

One – _small_ – part of him had to admire Dean's bravado. He could see the fear, held down by force of will, just below the surface of all that determination, but he just kept on, ignoring the warnings and the threats, ignoring common sense and apparently, all of his survival instincts, getting into his face and not even noticing that he was going to be in a world of hurt very soon, that he was going down.

"Oh, he's in here, all right." Lucifer slammed his fist into the side of Dean's face, feeling the skin over Sam's knuckles split as bone hit bone. "And he's going to feel the snap of your bones." He pulled Dean upright again, his fist smashing into the cheekbone and eye socket, sending Sam's incredibly annoying brother spinning to the ground beside the car.

"Every single one." He reached down and dragged the man back to his feet, pushing him against the side of the car. "We're going to take our time."

So good to just to let this anger out, to have a punching bag so worthy of his effort. Sam was allowed to see it all, just to make sure that he knew where the line was drawn. Dean was no longer a threat, not in any sense of the word, but this, this was satisfying … justice for all the time wasted, for the Horsemen lost, for his plans thwarted … he would take it all out in trade.

The only sounds in the dead, bare field were the sounds of bone against flesh, bone against bone, the grunts of pain and impact from his victim, the wet squelch of skin splitting and the soft patter of the drops of blood as they sprayed over the shiny black paint and glass.

He stopped, for a moment, gripping the collar of the jacket to lift the man higher against the glass, bring him into prime target range.

"Sam, it's okay. It's okay. I'm here. I'm here. I'm not going to leave you." Dean opened the eye that wasn't swollen shut, staring into his eyes through bloody lashes, pushing the words out through cut and bleeding lips.

_Unbelievable_. Lucifer looked down at him. Barely conscious and he was still trying to get through to his brother. What was that? A lack of intelligence? Disinterest in his own survival? He'd sensed, more than once in their encounters, that Dean was ready to die, would sacrifice himself willingly if that was what was needed. It didn't seem like that now, exactly. Something was driving him, something powerful enough to keep him focussed through the pain and disorientation and confusion that must be filling him, his brain slopping around in his skull after all those blows.

Love? The thought intruded tentatively, prompted as much by the frenzied shrieking of the soul he held bound, as by the sight of the man in front of him, dying from his injuries, but not acknowledging it, not yet.

_Michael's voice, resounding through the chambers of Heaven. "Bow down before the likeness and the image of the divinity." And in that face was love, the love of his Father, the love that shone through the flesh and bone and blood, the love that made up the soul, the soul that no angel possessed. This was love? This inability to stop trying? The half-blind persistence of this weak, dying creature in front of him?_

Lucifer's fist curled tight and smashed into the temple, then into the jaw again.

"I'm not going to leave you."

And still Sam's brother kept talking. Lucifer drew back his arm, his fist tightening again. Last time pays for all, he thought, fury filling his veins, crackling along his nerves. Say bye-bye, Sammy, your brother might go to Heaven, might be forgiven and sanctified and given Paradise, but you will never see him again.

He shifted slightly, to get the right angle to crack the skull open, and the reflection hit him precisely in the eye, a glint off the corner of the windshield trim, a spear driving into his brain. And he was held by it. And through it, his brain – Sam's brain – registered the sight of a small green army soldier, stuffed into the ashtray of the rear door armrest.

Lucifer felt the vessel fill … with memories, with emotions, threaded through by a single unbroken warp. A lifetime of memories, of love, of unity, of loyalty, of courage and that persistence, that determination that kept them getting up, time after time, no matter how badly they'd been beaten. Sam's memories, of his family, of his brother, of everything they had been through, and everything they had survived. Together. And the thread that joined and interlinked every single memory got stronger and brighter, winding its way around the angel, tightening around him, binding him, dragging him down. He fought against it, expending all of his power, reaching for the souls of Hell only to find that what wrapped around him cut him off from those, blanketed him in a burning white light that was shrouding him, suffocating him.

_No!_ He screamed at Sam, seeing his prison dissolve, seeing Sam's soul stride free and watch as the memories kept coming, getting thicker and stronger as they became more recent … Dean's sacrifice, his resurrection, his fear and pain and doubt and despair, his courage and vehemence and obstinate refusal to lie down and die, even when he wants to … the memories wrap around the angel and bind him, cutting off his senses, cutting him out.

* * *

Inside, in a prison made of love and memories, he waited. Sam would jump into the hole, and return them both to his cage. Once there, Sam would find out that Hell had a way of stripping the memories from the damned, and once the memories were gone, he would be free again.

He should have realised the danger that Dean Winchester represented. Should have realised the power that God, his Father, had given to humanity, the love and creation that made up the soul. It had looked like a weakness but it wasn't. He would take that into account when he made it out the next time.


	14. Chapter 14 Battle Creek 2010

_**Battle Creek, Michigan, July 2010**_

* * *

The new kitchen was small and dark, needing lights on all the time just to see what she was doing. She sighed. Why hadn't she noticed that when they'd looked at the place? _Because Dean's only concern had been that he could protect it, that it didn't have the big picture windows and sliding doors that made them vulnerable_. She gave the glass a final wipe and put it away, looking up as Dean walked in.

"Hey." Bright smile, it didn't really matter where they lived. So long as he was in her life, in whatever capacity he could be. She'd been in love with him from the moment she'd met him, and the years apart hadn't changed that, hadn't made it easier or let her forget him. She'd told him the truth, back at Bobby Singer's house. The last year had been the best of her life.

"Hey. Where's Ben?"

"Bike ride." She watched him walk past the counter, his eyes going straight to the windows, looking out to the street, his expression … more than concerned, she thought, more like worried. "What?"

His head bowed and he turned slowly back to the counter, leaning against it, and now there was more than worry on his face. He looked uncertain, and … frightened, she thought.

"I don't know what to do here, Lis. I mean, if I knew for sure what the safest thing was, then I'd do it. I'd stay here and look after you guys …," he looked down, shaking his head slightly, his voice getting softer as the next words came out, "or get as far away as I possibly can, but I don't know."

He looked back to her. She could feel that. God, she could see it. When they'd met, his decisiveness had been one of the most attractive things about him. He'd never looked uncertain, back then. Now, it seemed more and more, he was being pushed and pulled from multiple directions, and it was spinning him around, confusing him, worrying him.

"And I get what I've been doing lately, you know, what with the yelling," he grimaced, rubbing his forehead tiredly, "and the acting like a prison guard. It's just, that's not me."

"You tell yourself you're not going to be something, you know?"

She looked into his eyes as he continued, feeling his pain, feeling that insecurity, but not sure what she could say or do. He was afraid that something, from his past, would come after them. She didn't even know what that meant, not really. He hadn't told her about his past.

"But my dad was exactly like this. All the time," he said, his face screwing up as he pushed some thought or memory away, his eyes closing. "It's scaring the hell out of me."

It was another thing she didn't understand. He'd been a great father to Ben, taking time to spend with her son, always relaxed and patient with him, supportive and disciplined without ever being harsh. It was why his behaviour over the last couple of weeks was so strange, so unsettling to both of them. This was the first time he'd even mentioned his father.

"Dean." Lisa walked around the end of the counter. She'd spent the last two days thinking about this, while he'd been gone, relishing the peace and routine in the house, and aware that it was there because he was not. It was breaking her heart. Her dreams, her hopes of what the future might have brought were shattered, because once Sam came back, he wasn't hers anymore, he wasn't the Dean she'd gotten to know over the last year. He belonged to his old life again.

"Can I be honest?" She waited for him to listen, to shake off the past and come back to the present. "Maybe we're safer with you here, maybe gone. I don't know. The one thing that I do know is that you're not a construction worker. You're a hunter. And now you know your brother's out there, things are different."

He turned to her, his expression open and vulnerable in a way that she'd hardly ever seen in him, and she could already see that he knew what was coming, that he was afraid of what she was going to say.

"You don't want to be here, Dean."

"Yes, I do," he countered immediately, the certainty in his voice giving her hope that one day he might choose them. She couldn't ask him about that now, he was too unsure, it would only derail the rest of the conversation she needed to have, but he seemed clear on that, seemed clear on wanting to stay.

"Okay." She nodded. "Okay, but you also want to be there."

He looked away, and this time he didn't say anything, didn't deny it. The hope vanished. She wasn't sure if he would ever quit. She didn't know how she would deal with that, not yet. Maybe, if they had enough time, had a way to deal with his life, they could work something out. Maybe. If the monsters he feared didn't kill him first, if he didn't decide that they would be safer away from him.

"I get it." She looked at him, seeing that conflict, wanting to stay, wanting to go, needing both and unable, really, to have either. She slowed down, trying to find the words that would get them through it. "You're white-knuckling it living like this. Like what you are is some bad, awful thing. But you're not."

She hadn't understood it, not really, the way he felt about himself. He was careful to keep it hidden, along with his past, and it only came out occasionally, sometimes on the tail end of a nightmare, sometimes in a reaction. And every time she saw it, his face would close up, and he would turn away, and fight to shove it down again, and not let her see him until it was gone. They didn't talk about it; it was one of the many subjects they didn't discuss. But she knew that he was afraid. Afraid of something inside of him, something that had been a part of his past, something that he drank to blot out, to keep away from them.

Those first couple of months, after he'd shown up, they'd been hard. He'd spent most of the time locked in grief, or frustrated and angry, and she'd finally had to tell him that it wasn't working, he wasn't trying. He'd changed, almost overnight, after that conversation. And they'd had their ups and downs over the year, more ups than downs, she thought. He'd told her a little … just a sketch, really, of what had happened. Enough for her to realise what he wasn't saying, enough for her to realise that inside of him was a depth of pain she would probably never see, because he would never let her see it. She'd thought that, in time, he would be able to face it, face his memories, and share them with her. But they ran out of time, when Sam came back.

She was happy that Sam was alive, that he was out of Hell. Because so much of Dean's anguish had gone with that knowledge. But, it had stopped them, their relationship, cold. Now, he had someone else to talk to. Now, he had other things to do. She didn't know if he what he'd felt, how he'd been with her and Ben was real enough – _was important enough to him_ – to overcome that old life, but she was pretty sure he couldn't keep living like this, wound up so tight he couldn't think clearly, could only react, afraid of everything.

"But I'm not going to have this discussion every time you leave. And this is – this is just going to keep happening. So," She took a deep breath, looking up at him, "I need you to go."

He swallowed as he absorbed the words, his gaze dropping to the counter and lifting again to hers. "I can't just lose you and Ben."

Lisa shook her head. "That's not what I'm saying."

"You're saying hit the road."

"Dean, if there's some rule that says this all has to be either/or, how about we break it?" She looked at him, realising that she could've worded the previous part of the conversation a little better, seeing that he didn't understand what she meant, what she wanted to say.

"Me and Ben will be here," she added, more definitely, "and you come when you can. Just come in one piece. Okay?"

"You really think we can pull something like that off?" he asked, and she could see he was trying to buy some time, time to give his emotions a chance to settle, time to think if her tentative plan would work, time to realise that he wasn't going to lose them.

"It's worth a shot, right?" She smiled at him, and his mouth lifted slightly, though he couldn't meet her eyes again. When he did look up, one brow lifted slightly, he looked relieved.

"You scared the crap out of me, you know that?"

"Sorry." She wasn't, not really. She'd given him a back door, an out clause, and it had scared her to death to do it, even knowing how much he needed one. And she'd needed to know how committed he was, if he wanted to be with them or not. She was glad that he did, but her heart was still thumping from the possibility that he might have just agreed with her, and gone.

"Yeah … sorry." His mouth twisted slightly as he looked at her. "What time does Ben get home?"

"'Bout an hour and a half." The corners of her mouth tucked up slightly, the dimples to either side appearing.

"Plenty of time." He lifted his gaze to the ceiling above them. "Feel like making it up to me?"

She laughed at the suggestive one-sided smile he offered her, and nodded.


	15. Chapter 15 Canaan 2010

_**Canaan, Vermont, November 2010**_

* * *

Rufus put the shotgun on the table, and dropped the cleaning rag over it, as the front door got pounded again. He got up slowly, and walked to the monitor, shaking his head and muttering under his breath as he saw his visitor.

Dean Winchester gave him a big smile when he opened the door, a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue in either hand.

"Surprise."

"Yeah. Get in here." Rufus opened the door wider and closed it abruptly when Dean had staggered through, bouncing off one wall slightly.

"What's the occasion?" he asked, leaving a reasonable gap between the eldest Winchester and himself, in case Dean's sense of balance went the same way as his sense of caution.

"Birthday … yours, isn't it?" He stopped at the end of the hall, looking around in confusion. "Or maybe mine … didn't you have a kitchen back here?"

Rufus sighed. "Keep going."

"Okay."

The kitchen was at the end of the hall and Dean found his way to the table, plunking the bottles onto the hard top with an action that made Rufus wince. He got two glasses from the cupboard and sat down in the chair opposite, opening the bottle and pouring a generous amount into his glass and an inch into Dean's.

"What are you doing here?"

"Working a job nearby." Dean tossed back the glass and looked around the room, a remnant of the smile still curving his mouth. "Wanted someone to drink with."

"Uh huh." Rufus tilted his head to one side, regarding him. "And what happened to drinking buddy number one?"

"Sam?" Dean looked down at the table, shrugging. "He wanted to get some sleep."

"You figured I don't sleep?"

"Figured you'd stay up for this stuff." Dean waved a hand at the bottle, nearly sending it to the floor and Rufus' hand snapped out, catching the neck and removing it from Dean's swing zone.

"Got that right." He swallowed a mouthful. "Going to tell me what happened that sent you to the liquor store?"

The last trace of Dean's smile disappeared. "Demon took a family in Hardwick."

"Hardwick? That's two hours from here." Rufus straightened up. "You drove here like this from Hardwick? You trying to kill yourself, boy?"

Dean shook his head. "I wasn't that wasted when I left. I've been sitting out the front for an hour." He looked at Rufus. "Started out with three bottles."

Rufus leaned back in the chair. "Pretty bad?"

"Yeah." Dean closed his eyes. "Pretty bad."

The sound of the phone was shrill and demanding in the silence, and Rufus started, head snapping around to stare at the black wall phone accusingly. He got up and answered it, turning to the wall as he recognised the caller.

"Yeah, I got him." He glanced back at Dean, who'd reached across the table and snagged the bottle. "No. I'll hang onto him till morning. Can't drive now anyhow. Alright, see you then."

He put the receiver back, and walked back to the table.

Dean looked at the glass and added another splash. "That Bobby?"

"Yeah." Rufus sat down. "Sam was worried when you took off."

Dean nodded, lifting the glass and taking a big swallow.

"It's not that rotgut you drink at Singer's, have some respect." Rufus topped his own glass and moved the bottle back. "What happened?"

"I told you." Dean tipped his head back.

"Mmm-hmmm."

From the moment he'd met him, Rufus had known that Dean would head down this path. Some hunters never took it on, what they did, what they saw … born without feelings, or cauterised into numbness by the event that set them on the path. Others, usually the better ones, were all scarred by it, outside and in. And then there were a few who were very good, who had the worst scars of all, most of them on the inside. They burned out, if they were lucky, like Martin in that hospital down in Oklahoma. Or they drank themselves to death. Occasionally, they figured out a way to deal, but there was no happiness in them, no possibility of peace or contentment, just the high wire over the abyss and not going too fast or too slow, and knowing that the point of return had been passed a long time ago.

He thought Dean might be one of the very good ones. Too much imagination, too much empathy. It made for a great hunter. It also made for a great headcase. He looked at the shadows under the younger man's eyes, the hollows under the cheekbones. It wasn't just the one case, driving him now, but the cumulation of too many losses and no time to get it squared away, looked at and dealt with.

"Had a lot on your plate, lately," he said quietly, downing another mouthful. Dean lifted his head, looking at him through half-lidded eyes.

"About the same as usual." He looked down at the glass in front of him. "Nothing special."

Rufus looked at him, exhaling loudly. "You met Bobby in '88, Dean."

Dean looked up. "Yeah, I think I was nine."

"I met him in '72." Rufus picked up his glass, swirling the whiskey around. "He wasn't the man you know now. Not back then. He was an ordinary guy, a mechanic with a salvage yard business and a wife." He drank a little. "Karen was possessed by a demon, when the gate in Sioux Falls opened. Bobby stabbed her. It very nearly broke him for good."

Dean looked away, knowing bits of the story. Not all of it.

"He started hunting after that, and he was good at it. Smart and cautious and interested in everything. We hunted in the Far East, in Europe, sometimes together, sometimes not." Rufus leaned forward, gesturing slightly with his glass. "He burned out the first time after four years. Kept trying to bury everything, refused to deal."

"This a lesson for me, Rufus?" Dean looked sourly at him.

"Might be, if you're smart enough to learn it." Rufus stared at him. "You can't bury this shit, Dean, and you can't drink it away. It's like leaving corpses around, sooner or later, they come floating back up and by that time they stink and they're full of other things, and they'll try to smother you."

He closed his eyes. "Took me a long time to learn how to deal. But that's why I've made it this far."

"You're not exactly a poster boy for mental health, Rufus." Dean finished his glass and reached for the bottle. Rufus was faster, and moved it out of reach.

"No, but I haven't burned out, and my doctor says my liver is still functioning." He smiled. "And I've been hunting a lot longer than you have."

"And how I am supposed to deal with this stuff?"

"Look at it. Accept it. Let it go." Rufus shrugged. "It's not on you if someone doesn't make it, Dean. You did your best, didn't you? That's all we can do, any of us, any time."

Dean shook his head. "Too easy."

Rufus snorted. "You think we have it tough? Try neurosurgeons – they don't get to live in our black and white world. They get to choose between saving someone's life but leaving them a vegetable, or letting them die. Or maybe even a cop, arrest someone, see the judge throw out the case two months later because of some trivial paperwork botch up and then pick up the pieces after the sonofabitch kills again."

Dean looked at him, eyes narrowed and dark with memory. "The family was a single mom, two kids. We couldn't save the mother. One of the kids was catatonic with fear, they both got carted off by Social Services." He looked at his glass, only a third left. "No happy ending, nothing but crap all the way round."

He dragged in a deep breath and looked away. Rufus watched him. He didn't know how it was Dean had ended up feeling responsible for everything, although Bobby had speculated about their upbringing from time to time. He did know that it would drag him down, overload him with the deaths and the failures, the mistakes and those moments of plain bad luck, until he couldn't go any further, until he longed for death, the peace and quiet of the dark womb in the earth.

"You want to give it up?" Rufus looked at his glass. "Go ahead. You got some skills, you could get a regular job."

The look he got was a mixture of disbelief and disgust. "Didn't Bobby fill you in on how well I did at that?"

"Must have missed that update." Rufus raised a brow. "What happened?"

"Djinn came after me, Sam was back." He finished his whiskey. "Didn't work out all that well."

"How long where you out?"

"Nearly a year." Dean looked at the bottle.

"And before the djinn and Sam? How was that?"

Dean was silent for a long moment. "I started to feel like …," He trailed off uncertainly.

"Like you'd lost your purpose? Like it wasn't really you anymore?" Rufus prompted him, and watched Dean's gaze come up to meet his own.

"How'd you know that?"

"Tried it myself, a while ago." Rufus shook his head. "You can't go from this life to completely normal. It's not possible and you end up hurting everyone around you trying."

He watched the expressions cross Dean's face at the words. "Yeah, see you already found that out too."

"So I get a choice of burning out, turning into you or hurting the people that I care about?" Dean growled at him, his eyes cutting away.

"Pretty much." Rufus slid the bottle back toward him. "But if you turn into me, at least you survive."

Dean looked around the shabby room. "If this is the price of survival, it's not such an appealing prospect."

Rufus' teeth flashed white against his skin. "'Course, you got at least a couple more years before you really start to feel the despair, Dean. Plenty of time to make a decision."

He stood up, picking up the bottles and moving them to the counter, taking his glass to the sink.

"Couch in the living room is comfortable." He looked down at the man hunched at the table. "I got things to do later today, so do you."

Dean stared into his glass, then tossed the whiskey back, holding the glass up against his lips until the final drop fell. He walked slowly to the sink and put the glass into it, then followed Rufus down the hall. The couch was long, and comfortable and he crumpled onto it.

From the doorway, Rufus could see his profile, outlined against the dark fabric by the faint light from the streetlights outside. His eyes were open.


	16. Chapter 16 Dearborn 2011

_**Dearborn, Michigan, October 2011**_

* * *

Jo stood in the shadows of the room, watching. She'd felt the compulsion and had been pulled unceremoniously from the afterlife by this god, who still wandered the earth long after his worshippers had died and turned to dust. Osiris had some kind of control over certain things. She couldn't quite make out the shape of that control yet but it felt powerful. Dean would fight to live. Everything she knew about him told her that.

Dean watched his brother leave the room, and poured the thick line of salt around himself in a circle, then he straightened up, looked around.

"You can come out now."

Jo looked at his back, the slump of his shoulders. What was wrong with him? "You know I'd never do this."

"I know." He stared at the floor.

"I guess it's his thing. Some kind of twisted eye for an eye." She walked slowly around him, waiting for him to move. She realised he had no weapon with him in the circle, no shotgun loaded with salt, no iron. Was he just going to stand there, accepting that he was going to die, that she'd been sent to kill him. Why wasn't he fighting this?

"It's okay." His eyes were almost empty, when he turned his head to look at her. A softening, she felt, for her. Nothing there for himself.

"No, it's not," she said, then glanced down. "You deserve better."

His attention sharpened and he looked at her, really looked at her for the first time. "No, you did. You deserved better, Jo."

What had he been telling himself, in the years since she'd died? That it was his fault? Had he convinced himself that he'd somehow persuaded to come against her will? Had he forgotten what she'd said to him, to Sam, to her mother, lying on the floor of that store, knowing that she could do some good before she died? This wasn't the Dean she remembered. Guilt, yes, sure, but not lying down, not giving up.

"Dean, my life was good. Really."

"He was right, you know. That dick judge. About me."

She frowned as he swept over what she'd said, as if it didn't matter, as if … as if he hadn't heard it. She turned away.

"No, he wasn't."

She was spirit, compelled to be here, compelled to follow the orders of the ancient god, and she hadn't thought in terms of life and death, of flesh and blood, for a long time, her thoughts weren't coming in linear patterns anymore. She didn't want to be here, not for this, not for him, it wasn't fair, it wasn't justice, and she had no reason for revenge. And he wasn't fighting, she could see that he wasn't going to fight for his life. How was it that he wanted to die now? What had happened to him in the time between? How could he think that he should feel all this guilt when it had been her choice? She struggled to think of a way to break through to him, to make him see that he didn't have to carry this load. There was no time to ask him, no time to make him see that he was wrong.

"You were a kid." A sudden bleakness in his voice, as if he'd been swallowed by a wave of guilt.

Is that what he'd thought? That she'd been a kid who hadn't known what she was doing? What was going on with him? She stopped and turned back to him.

"Not true."

"You and Sam," he said softly. "I just – you know, hunters are never kids. I never was. I didn't even stop to think about it."

And again, it was as if he hadn't heard her. Where had that even come from? Him and Sam, they'd been raised together; he knew her story … what was going on? She wanted to slap him. She wanted to get into his face, and grab him and shake him and tell him he hadn't made the choices for them, they'd all been adults, capable of making their own choices, for taking responsibility for those choices. She couldn't move, those words wouldn't come out, for some reason. Goddammit, there wasn't enough time.

"It's not your fault." She stared at him. "It wasn't on you."

"No, but I didn't want to do it alone." His gaze cut away, a flickering wry smile crossing his face. "Who does?"

His gaze dropped again. "No, the right thing would have been to send your ass back home to your mom."

Time beat at her, the god's will ticking away inside of her somewhere. Had Dean got so fogged in by all that had gone wrong over the years that he'd forgotten that Ellen had been there too? Nothing he was saying made any sense. She opened her mouth to tell him that Ellen had thought it was the right thing to do as well … but it wouldn't come out.

"Like to have seen you try," she said dryly instead. It raised a slight smile, as he folded his arms over his chest, and it was just a glimpse of Dean, the real Dean, a shred of him shining out of the darkness. She walked around him. "He was right about one thing."

"What, your massive crush on me?"

That was the old Dean too, a bit of him, anyway. She looked away, smiling at his ego, in spite of herself. "Shut up."

The smile vanished when she saw the pain in his eyes, and she pushed away the desire to ask him. There was no time for that. She had to tell him what was important. What he needed to know. "You carry all kinds of crap you don't have to, Dean."

He'd heard that, his gaze falling, his face tightening, the jaw muscle twitching. "It kinda gets clearer when you're dead," she added lightly, with a shrug.

"Well, in that case, you should be able to see that I am ninety percent ... crap," he admitted, swallowing against his feelings, the half-assed smile not even getting close to his eyes. He was afraid, she thought suddenly. Afraid it was true. "I get rid of that, what then?"

"You really want to die not knowing?" She stared at him. Where had he gone? Where the hell was the man she'd been in love with? Not this guy, not this guy standing in front of her, telling her what a loser he was, filled with pain and despair so deep he couldn't even be honest, with her or himself. She wanted to ask him what he thought he was doing. What Sam would do when he found himself alone. Why he was giving up. None of those questions would come out of her mouth, and she saw the god's control then … control over the victim … and control over the executioner.

She heard the god's voice, felt the compulsion tighten around her. "Dean."

"Yeah." He looked down.

"It's time."

There was no more time. No more time to make him run. To make him fight. She was beside the stove and her fingers closed around the knobs, turning the gas on, unable to smell it, but seeing the movement as it rose in the air above the hobs. Dean, run! She wanted to scream it out but her voice was locked. He stood there, watching her, despair filling his eyes, and a helplessness holding him still. She was going to kill him, in an explosion to match the way she'd died … but the god hadn't known, hadn't known that she'd died before the blast, had died of the wounds of the hellhounds before her mother had pressed the button. An old god, but not an omniscient one.

Dean was going to die for nothing.


	17. Chapter 17 Junction City 2012

_**Junction City, Kansas, March 2012**_

* * *

Garth drove steadily, not fast, through the night. The road was wet and the hiss of the tyres over the asphalt was a soothing noise, a background to his thoughts on the case. Beside him, scrunched slightly in the narrow bucket seat of the Pacer, Dean stared out at the road unwinding in their headlights, his deep voice a low murmur just audible over the car's noises. Garth was getting used to his process, this apparent rambling over the facts, over what they'd seen and heard, knew it didn't require a response from him until something snagged Dean's attention hard enough to warrant a discussion. He glanced over at him as his voice got a little louder, indicating that had just happened.

"So, kid in the woods sees something that nobody else does. Then Tess sees a monster, and Jim doesn't. What's the thread?"

"Hmm. Well, certain mutants see infrared," he offered after a moment's thought. He caught the slow sideways turn of Dean's head in his peripheral vision, recognising the poorly-hidden exasperation in the gesture.

He'd heard a lot about Dean Winchester and his brother, Sam, before Bobby had called him, back in November, to give Dean back up on a case in Vegas. There were a lot of rumours floating around about the brothers, rumours of demon deals and Dean rising from Hell, rumours of demon blood and Sam starting the Apocalypse. Bobby had squashed a few of them, had given him a little detail on others. He'd been pretty intimidated at the thought of working with Dean, if the truth were to be told. But when he'd walked into the diner, Dean'd been just a guy. From what he'd heard and what his imagination had conjured, he'd been expecting Thor or Odin, complete with lightning bolts at the least. Not the tired and worried-looking man in his early thirties who'd dropped into the chair opposite and handed him a paper. Bobby had warned him about Dean's temper, but so far, he hadn't seen any sign that it was any worse than anyone else's. He had seen a lot of control, a lot of repression, and a lot of eye-rolling, but the man had been and had remained professional, and had even, on rare occasions, let a bit of charm slip out.

"Grown-up drinks," Dean said speculatively. "Tess chugged her mom's, and vic number one was plastered."

"Right." Garth considered that. "So ... whoa."

He turned to look at Dean, getting the familiar rush from a breakthrough idea that he was pretty sure was right. "Monster you got to be drunk to see. Cool!"

Another thought occurred to him, relating to how that might work out in reality. "Also ... hard to fight."

He heard the little scritchings of the lid of the flask that Dean carried being unscrewed, saw the upward tilt in the corner of his eye, and glanced over, seeing another mouthful of the contents of the flask go down his partner's throat. A lot of hunters who'd been around a while drank, it was no big. But Dean drank a bit more than most, he thought. Maybe quite a bit more. Didn't seem to affect him.

In a life where over ninety percent of the participants were driven by the past, by revenge and guilt, fear and anger, Garth Fitzgerald IV was the exception that proved the rule. He'd stumbled into hunting one day, four years ago, when his girlfriend had moved into a place with a poltergeist. With no experience and no knowledge, he'd just tried to find out whatever he could about the spirit that was making life hell in the little rent-controlled apartment on the lower East Side, and had managed to vanquish it for good. It had been, he knew now, the easiest of all entries into the life of hunting, the spirit hadn't been malevolent, just confused, and had tolerated his multiple clumsy attempts at cleansing with a remarkable amount of patience. When it was done, he'd found that he was hooked. The few cases he'd managed to find had been on a gentle experience curve and by the time he'd run into something truly difficult and very lethal, he'd had enough experience to handle it …well, just. It had been over a year before he'd met another hunter. That incident had been an eye-opener. A frightening eye-opener. Since then, he'd met good hunters and bad hunters. Those who'd managed to hang onto their humanity, and those who were almost worse than the creatures they pursued. None of them had had all their ducks in a row, though. They operated by instinct and emotion and had cut themselves off from any kind of normality. Not, he thought, through choice, but from the haphazard way they lived their lives.

Dean was a good hunter. And he still had a firm grip on his humanity. But the life was killing him by inches. Garth could see it in the too-clipped words, in the persistent drinking, in the haunted expressions that sometimes crossed his face, showed in his eyes. It was more than being driven, he thought, Dean was being flogged. And he didn't seem to have any idea that it didn't have to be like that. Back in November, he'd seemed better. He wondered what had happened in between to have amped up the desperation he sometimes noticed in Dean's eyes now.

Dean exhaled audibly, and screwed the lid back on. " Just getting in the zone." He glanced sideways at Garth. "You are strictly on wine coolers."

"Hey, I love those." Garth grinned, flicking a look at him.

"Anything sweet." A memorable evening with a bottle of crème de menthe came back and he laughed softly. "Whoo!"

He didn't miss the soft sigh beside him, or the sound of the flask lid being undone again. The guy really needed to lighten up and smell the roses, try life outside of the narrow circle he kept himself in. He had a feeling initiating a conversation along those lines might bring out the much-mentioned but so far unseen temper. He also had the feeling that just having a conversation like that wouldn't do Dean much good. Whatever was eating him, whatever was driving him, it probably needed years of daily sessions with a good psychotherapist, not just a quick conversation driving along a black road with another hunter.

"So, uh, what's with the grody flask anyway? Lucky charm?

"It's Bobby's."

Garth heard the warning implicit in Dean's tone. Bobby was one of several subjects that Dean wouldn't talk about, not in any depth. He watched the taillights of the car in front of him as a recent memory hit him. _Dean. And the flask. And the squawking from the EMF_. He'd thought the gauge was faulty, thought Dean's was too. But maybe not.

"Really?" He thought about how he could raise this subject without irritating, or worse, enraging the man riding shotgun beside him. "'Cause, um ... you think there's a possibility that Bobby's riding your wave?

"No, we gave him a hunter's wake," Dean said abruptly, with the clear intention of stopping this line of conversation right there. Garth thought he could let it drop, could leave it alone but what good would that do? Pretending things didn't exist worked for Joe Q … it didn't work so well for hunters.

"Yeah, I-I burned my cousin Brandon, and he stayed stuck." He glanced at Dean, trying to come with more examples where just burning the remains didn't get everything. "And – and – and they got ghosts in India, and they cremate everybody over there." He could feel Dean's impatience growing beside him, the guy was practically radiating annoyance. "It's just instinct, but maybe there is EMF around here. It just ain't the job."

"All right, we're not gonna talk about this, okay? Not in the middle of work," Dean voice rose. Under the words, under the gesture and the tone, Garth heard something else. Uncertainty.

"Sorry," he said quickly. Dean wasn't sure that Bobby wasn't around. Hadn't stayed on. And he was worried about it.

He wondered why he was trying to deny it. It couldn't be that hard to find out, one way or another, for sure, could it? Any good medium could have told him. And Bobby'd had a reason to stay, he knew. He hadn't known the old man for that long, just a couple of years, but he knew people, knew how to read them, and Bobby would have died for the Winchesters, that had been apparent in every word he'd spoken of them, every expression on his face when he'd talked of them. He might well have wanted to stick around, try and help them, or protect them.

The insistent ring of Dean's cell broke the incipient silence.

"Just hope that fire did the trick," he said quietly, wondering how long it might take for a ghost like Bobby's to become disillusioned with being stuck on the earthly plane, unable to do much more than watch helplessly as events moved along without his input, as people he loved died and passed over, as the injustice of his death went without vengeance. He wondered what it would do to the man sitting next to him to have to lay his ghost to rest, if it came to that. Nothing good, he thought. Nothing good at all.

"Hey, Sam." Dean listened for a moment. "Yeah, got it. We're on our way."


	18. Chapter 18 Brookfield 2012

_**Brookfield, Missouri, May 2012**_

* * *

They stood on the soft dirt, in front of the tarp-covered car. The boatshed had been Frank's idea. His aunt's-cousin's-best friend's-ex-husband's place, in Delaware. A holiday home on a little, unremarkable lake, unused for the last ten years. Dean looked at the beige-covered shape and felt a flood of relief that she was still there, untouched, just as he'd left her. He'd missed her so much this last year it had felt like losing another member of his family, another friend. At least if he was going out this time, she'd be there, not left forgotten here.

"Thanks for the lift." He glanced back at Cas, his mind already going over the logistics of how he was going to pull the next twenty four hours together. With the car, he thought they could make an entrance, something fairly obvious, that would give him and Sam a nice diversion to slip by unnoticed. He wondered if Meg could drive.

"My pleasure." The angel hesitated for a moment, watching him step toward the car. "Dean."

Dean turned back at the implicit request in the word, feeling his irritability with the angel rise again. He understood, he really did. The times he'd wanted no more part in the mess around them, the times he'd longed to be able to ditch the whole thing and go on a year-long bender that would end with him in a coffin … he got it. It didn't stop him from wishing that the angel hadn't picked this time to throw in the towel. David and Goliath stories were great reading, not so much fun when you were in them, playing David. "Yes, we've been over it. I get it – you can't help."

Castiel ignored the irritation in Dean's voice. "If we attack Dick, and fail, you and Sam die heroically, correct?"

Dean looked at him uneasily, wondering which tangent he was going to be expected to follow. He didn't have a lot of time for more of the angel's peculiar mental processes right now. "I don't know. I guess."

"And at best, I die trying to fix my own stupid mistake," Castiel mused, thinking through the possibilities. "Or ... I don't die – I'm brought back again. I see now. It's a punishment resurrection. It's worse every time." He looked at Dean.

Dean stared back at him, eyes narrowed as he tried to fathom what Cas was attempting to get across with this rambling discourse on resurrections and repentance. He missed the old Cas, blunt, to the point of unsociability. "I'm sorry." He shook his head. "Uh, we're talking about God crap, right?"

"I'm not good luck, Dean," Castiel said.

Dean looked at him, running a hand over his face as he finally got what the angel was trying to say. Not good luck? No. Who was? Necessary though, he was necessary if they were going to have a snowball's of catching Dick in the one blind spot he had, and ganking the monster, sending his murdering ass back to Purgatory. The angel was their only ace. They needed him. "Yeah, but you know what? Bottom of the ninth, and you're the only guy left on the bench ... sorry, but I'd rather have you. Cursed or not."

His gaze cut away. The whole discussion was irrelevant. None of them were good luck, all of them were cursed, and it didn't matter. The job was the job, it wouldn't go away, and this was their one chance to finish it. "And anyway, nut up, all right? We're all cursed. I seem like good luck to you?"

He saw the change in the angel's expression, as if Cas had just discovered something. It made him more nervous than he already was. "What?"

Castiel looked down, a very small smile curving his mouth. "Well, I don't want to make you uncomfortable," he raised his head and looked at Dean. "But I detect a note of forgiveness."

Dean looked away, huffing slightly at the words. Forgiveness. What the fuck was that anyway? He hadn't made a decision about it. He hadn't thought about it. What Cas had done to Sam, to everyone, in Heaven and on earth, had been …

_Human_.

The thought hit him suddenly, entire and obvious. The dumbass angel hadn't been acting out of spite or malice, just … plain need. He knew about making decisions like that. Without thought for the consequences, for the future. He'd made one or two like that himself. And paid for them. And lived with the fallout. He pushed the thoughts away. _After_. After they'd killed Dick and gotten rid of the levis, he could get this crap straight for himself. Right now, he needed to get moving.

"Yeah, well, I'm probably going to die tomorrow, so," he said shortly, mouth twisting as he thought of how close to the reality that was likely to be. It was highly likely he wouldn't be getting his me-time after tomorrow.

"Well, I'll go with you," Castiel said firmly. "And I'll do my best."

Dean looked at him for a moment, then away, fighting against the relief he could feel welling up in him. Without the angel, it would have been a futile suicide run, tilting at a windmill that couldn't possibly be brought down. With Cas, well, there was definitely a very small chance that they'd actually be able to kill the thing, if absolutely everything else went right. They'd probably still die, but that would be a small price to pay if they could get rid of Dick.

"Thanks." He couldn't spare the time … or the control … to say anything else.

It was a start, he guessed, to Castiel returning to his old self. He thought of what he'd said to Kevin. _I think maybe they just don't have the equipment to care. Seems like when they try, it just ... breaks them apart._ Maybe he'd been wrong about that. Maybe they just had lower pain thresholds than people. Less tolerance for the mess and muck and mayhem that most people had to face on a daily basis. And, of course, no souls, let's not forget about that. His brother hadn't done so good without a soul.

"So ...," Castiel said in a low voice, looking around them furtively, sliding his gaze back to Dean. "Can I ask the plan?"

Dean looked at him. Was Cas developing a sense of humour? He hid a brief smile and looked at the covered car. "Well, according to Crowley," he looked back at the angel, "Dick knows we're coming. So we're going to announce ourselves. Big."

_And we're going to succeed this time_, he thought, _we're going to deal with this and get payback for Bobby_. The need for that vengeance burned along his veins like fire. With the head cut off, the body would flounder and he and Sam could do mop up duty and then … then he was going somewhere … he wasn't sure where yet, but somewhere he didn't have to think about anything and just do … nothing. For at least a week. He didn't think he'd last much past a week, but the thought of it was like an oasis in the desert. He pulled the tarp from the car, and opened the trunk. Just him and his baby, away from everything and everybody. This time, he was going to get a prize for sticking his neck yet again to save the world.


End file.
